The 2024 Game of the Year Spectacular

Hello and welcome to Into the Aether. Goaty 2024 Bigly. My name is Steven. What's your favorite game, Hilger? My name is AJ.

falari i panicked falari is really good i love that they chose an improv game that like shooed away any potential new listeners like right off the bat thanks for giving thanks for dropping by go listen to the besties um they did like a two-parter it was really fun uh anyway welcome to Goni 2024 I'm so happy to be here I've traveled through uh the end of time aka Secaucus Junction and

the remaining uh santa con travelers yeah i was really nervous i got on the train i'm currently visiting my family in new jersey and we're recording in the big apple in brooklyn And so I got on the train to the city and the minute I got on, I saw Santa hat.

and reindeer and I was like oh fuck it's SantaCon which actually makes it harder to get here and then I learned it was the like SantaCon returning to the North Pole yes so it was we were two ships passing in the night thankfully thank god yeah um i want to give a huge shout out right at the top yeah we are recording in a different spot than usual usually we record this in my apartment

We couldn't this year. We are now recording in the apartment of our friends, Alana Okun, who's been on the show, friend of the show, and Brendan Klinkenberg, who is also friend of the show, has been on the show. We're in their apartment. Thank you so much.

to the two of them and their Cat Tuesday for allowing us here. Thank you, Alana and Brendan. I'll also give a quick shout out to will emily and their cat domino who also offered their apartment um which is great so in our time of need we had multiple places to record which is i also think if we do our best work when we're together and when there's a looming cat in the distance

Yeah. Like that's the one thing we're missing in your apartment. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. The lizard doesn't come out until nighttime. We do. It needs to be an animal who's like, oh, number 10. Yeah. shows up every once in a while we need either a cat shedding or a lizard malting to really get going yeah yeah what about the new skyrim port they always just show up and ask

The game where you kill big lizards. That's why I get out of my apartment. Anyway. I'm very excited. Do we want to run down like kind of... how we're feeling about 2024 what led us here uh what's the what's the schedule bb yeah yeah i think that's a that's a good place to start um i mean right at the top i'll say 2024 fascinating year for video games yeah i think

you and I have talked about this a lot but was it 2021 was the year where it was like there's no clear front runner every list is like just vibes based yes like you're just it's more like reading somebody's tarot than it is putting together a game of the year list. You're just learning a lot about a person by their 2021 game of the year list. If you want to learn about a person, go ask them what their favorite games of 2021 were.

and I feel like weirdly this year is very similar in that way like I hear similar names more like it feels like they're kind of like yeah four to five games that are like poll in the discord which I always love doing for everyone's favorite game and it was much more even this year yeah like usually there's like last year for example it was like Baldur's Gate 3

and tears the kingdom just demolished and it was kind of everything else right and that's the thing usually there's like just mathematically one or two games that like have enough marketing and are make a big enough splash they're like usually the front runners yeah but it's cool because the reality is more like 2021 where like everyone has their subjective opinion you know games find you at a certain time i think it's more interesting when everyone has different picks

our discussion today yeah yeah it does not bode well for the run time of the episode though I don't think no no that yeah and when it when Baldur's Gate 3 shows up I mean it didn't bode well last year either yes that was our longest one right so

yeah i'm interested i'm interested in this year specifically i think the top five for the show so just for those of you who haven't listened to a godie episode before the way this works is uh we have a bunch of different things we're going to do one of them is games of the other year go toys which we've been doing for a couple years which is just

other games you know the show is about not being beholden to uh the current video game release cycle so it feels weird to not mention all of the other hundreds of games that we played this year especially doing like console retrospectives exactly those are go toys are games that like

we played for the first time this year but didn't come out in 2024 yeah and that's probably i think the reason like we kind of did that as a joke in 2021 and then it seemed to really resonate with people listen to the show i think that's because like

That's probably your experience. Like, you know, if you're not like following games and getting them as they come out, like your favorite game of this year is probably like Ocarina of Time or whatever you played for the first time. Yeah. Or maybe you play Baldur's Gate 3 this year instead of last year. God forbid you wait a year. Yeah, totally. So we're starting with that. That'll be first. And then after that, we're going to do our list, 10 through 1.

After that, we're going to talk about Discord Game of the Year. For those of you in the TWG Discord, thank you for doing that. Our honorable mentions. And then after that... we put together a top five and then after that we say goodbye and look ahead at 2025 and I think the reason you're like it'll be interesting to see where the show's top five is because we basically look at all three of our lists and also think about like

This game was six and this game was third for you. Therefore, it's, you know, the average of that. There's a lot of weird calculus. It's more like what kind of represents like the soul of the show the most. And then we read the list over and over again until it feels good in the mouth. And we're like, well, we should maybe switch two and three because I do.

My ideal version of this is that we have a big whiteboard and we can look at it. I would love to be able to write. I would love to have a microphone affixed. to the whiteboards. You can hear the squeaking as I write the names. Oh no. But that's our plan. That's our plan for Goaty this year. Should we... Should we just move? What's first? Is it GoToys first? Let's GoToys first, but AJ has told us that they have a surprise. I think we do GoToys first.

okay because i think mine will work as a nice bridge excited for into the top 10s yeah yeah i'm excited okay so aj has a surprise for us that's all we know about it yeah um all right do you want to go first stephen sure yeah i'll go first we used to flip a coin and i won like three years yeah we don't flip a coin anymore it's just Fate has determined this even always goes first. Yeah, exactly. We were flipping a two-sided coin.

so okay so my go toys for 2024 i did actually order it this time oh i normally there are no order but i ordered them because i actually uh for my youtube channel memory card manuscript i'm doing a video about my top five goatee and go toys

So I have a little bit more to say about the top five here, but I'll go through my 10. So number 10 for me for games of the other years is Harvest Moon, A Wonderful Life, which is a game we played for the GameCube episode. This is a really interesting one because I feel like it's... it's i think i mean i haven't played a lot of the older harvest moon games like for i think the one on super nintendo is now available on switch which i'm excited to check out um but i think

what i've sort of gathered is like the further back you go like it feels very basic by today's standards like yeah if your entry point into this kind of life sim farming genre is stardew valley i think if you go backwards with harvest moon you'll be like oh i kind of miss like

this feature or whatever yeah um the thing about harvard soon a wonderful life is it simultaneously does kind of feel like a little empty but that also adds to this like it's it's probably the first one that kind of has like a more dramatic story and also like i think most effectively like it's the one where it ends with you dying um right and it kind of begins weirdly similarly to twilight princess where it's two people looking at a body of water one is like

not so subtly like an older version of the main character and they're like being sad is weird but i don't know i just i i found this game really hypnotizing i really like the gamecube aesthetic like this era of kind of early 3D I mean it's coming back in a lot of indie games I feel specifically like kind of the early PS1

style with a lot of horror games but i really like this and i also really like the characters and i'm glad that i checked out the story of seasons remake and that just feels better to play overall i think if you're curious about this entry i would recommend the story of seasons remake on switch it's one of those things it kind of has uh what i'll say and what we'll repeat throughout this episode the persona 3 problem where it's like the stuff that kind of gets in the way is almost the point

yeah but not having it is also inherently more pleasant right uh so yeah wonderful life i just i it just really struck a chord with me and i really liked it um another one uh magic the gathering arena you gotta be honest with yourself dude I got back into magic this year because a co-worker and friend of mine was like, I'm on my way to get, you know, the new set, which was like a Redwall inspired thing. Right. So I made an otter deck and my otter deck did pretty well. My raccoon deck.

Got me to platinum, baby. And it was just nice. That sounds good. I don't know what I mean, but it sounds good. Platinum means you've been playing a lot, I think, more than anything else.

but all that is like i i mentioned on the show that i was like really into magic in college and it like maybe was almost a problem and i've always been interested in returning to it but i've also like it's a little bit like let me get back into smoking like yeah you know but weirdly enough having arena like there's definitely some monetization on the app that you can critique but

But overall, it weirdly is cheaper than playing with the real cards because you just get them by playing. And they give you a lot right away to build decks with. So I found it to be a pretty nice... like go-to game when i just have like i'm on lunch or i want to play with some friends and we don't have to have the whole setup

So it was just nice kind of getting back into magic and also feeling like, oh, this doesn't have to be a problem for me specifically. Yeah. So I enjoyed that. Next one is Tokimeki Memorial. Hell yeah. Which we got to play. This is it would probably be higher if.

we got to play the ps1 version because you and i played the super famicom like fan translated version of it yeah um and it was just really i mean it's a great game in its own way but it also like for those who know uh if you want like a whole rundown on it watch the tim rogers video that you probably know about already um but it's basically the first the first like fully fledged dating sim uh and when you play that game you not only see it's

effect on like other dating sims but also like like persona is straight up using like the same systems yeah and it does kind of feel like alongside like chrono trigger and other like rpgs of the 90s like one of the most influential games that came out in that time absolutely so i i kind of felt like good about doing one run of it and then calling it there but it was really like enlightening to see like oh this is where a lot of the games we love started like this is where persona started

elements of Fire Emblem and even Mass Effect if you want to lump it in there. Any game that kind of gamifies relationships owes something knowingly or not to Tokimeki Memorial. So it was great to finally be able to play it.

total swing to another tone Killer 7 is my number 7 this is a big surprise for me the i don't know if you felt this way too brendan but like for the gamecube episode uh a lot of it was revisiting things for me because i had a fairly like strong history with that console on like dreamcast which was like almost all new right

Killer 7, though, I hadn't played before, and I wasn't sure if it was going to... It feels like the kind of game that's very love or hate. It's a Suda 5-1 game who's probably most well-known for No More Heroes.

but it's like even more of an alienating tone than that series is like it's basically one of those games where it's like this feels like unfiltered creativity for better and for worse that can either give you the star wars prequels or killer seven basically i feel yeah uh and i just found like

There are definitely things about it I find off-putting, but I found the tone and the central loop of being this very bizarre rail shooter dungeon crawler. It all really worked for me. I felt very gripped by it. I couldn't tell you what it's like.

About yeah, I would probably need to like think about it more and probably play it again to really grasp at the themes and narrative but i don't really think it really wants you to do that i think it really is more of like a tone and atmosphere driven work um and it just feels very rebellious in a way that doesn't feel like 2000s

cool it feels like i just can't believe like this was made and we can play it you know yeah yeah totally um so that's killer seven uh six return of the obradin the hype is real if i got to it i'm having a great time i still haven't finished it this also might be higher if i like saw the

grand conclusion but i love the aesthetic i love a good mystery it's probably like one of the best like detective games ever made all right top five baby here's a fun one i played this literally the day after we recorded goatee last year

so it's like the quickest amazing uh astral ascent oh hell yeah i love it it's uh it's a Hades like as you would say but it's a roguelike where you're basically like in this very bizarre version of purgatory and the bosses are the zodiac sign so it's kind of already sold from that right

I just find it definitely has a bit of a slow start and I think it throws a lot of info at you right away. And it was also in early access for a long time. So I think like... first impressions might be like this is cool but maybe it needs a little bit more polish but once you get like once you beat the first boss the game kind of immediately opens up in a way that i think like

i just think it deserves way more attention i think it definitely stands alongside the current greats of of roguelikes that are kind of this like uh dead cellsy kind of like twitchy arcade combat yeah what are you laughing about oh backlog just went down well no way

I made a backup notes app. I should have, and I didn't. And now I'm furiously taking screenshots of things. Four is Slay the Princess, which I played for Halloween and recently got a free update that adds a bunch of new... story stuff um but this is also a really cool visual novel um i got it a while ago but was sort of waiting for the right time because i like horror but i kind of need to be in the right headspace i found it to be like

pretty approachable in terms of the level of of violence it definitely gets graphic but it feels like cartoony enough that i never felt like too grossed out by it um but this game is basically like the premise slay the princess you're told by this off-screen narrator that you have to go and slay the princess otherwise the world ends and basically the whole game is you having this kind of like

tug of war of trust where it's like one of the first things you see after the narrator says what your job is is like all every possible question you can ask you could be like i don't want to do this i'm just going to go for a walk in the woods or like what did the princess do what does it mean like

what is the end of the world actually mean um you know any any question you could ask or you can just say nothing and go and do it and without spoiling what i found really amazing about this game is that it really does adapt to everything you do like it gives you a very binary choice but there are a lot of subtle things like did you go down to the basement to talk to her without the knife did you bring the knife and then drop it what was like your tone of voice to certain characters

And I was really impressed by that. I think ultimately, like I found the plot to get a little bananas towards the end in a way that didn't work for me. But I think that central element of trust. worked the whole time and i i think everyone's gonna have a different read on it a different experience

And the voice acting and the writing is really strong. So I had a great time with it and I'll probably play it again just to see what else is there, especially after this update. I want to see different outcomes of the story. So I had a great time with Side of Princess. Yeah. Good game. Zero Ranger is number three. This is a Sky Ballet game we played. You better believe it. It's amazing. It's just really good. I don't have much to say about it.

if you're interested in kind of like an ikaruga-esque shmup sky ballet um i would definitely recommend zero ranger because it's also kind of made to be like an entry point in the genre i'd argue yeah because like a lot of these types of games are either built to like appease the fans that needed to be like as hard as possible or eat quarters or both and zero rangers system of giving you more lives the more you play it

uh it makes it feel like the game the game is literally telling you not to give up the whole time but also telling you that what you're doing is impossible which is a nice psychological trick to keep you playing and there's definitely there's a weird like sort of yoko taro-esque story happening in the background that i still don't really uh similar to killer seven i'm like i don't know if i fully like

get this but it adds another layer another reason to come back it's like i'm not only wanting this to beat the game and to score chase it's fun to play but there's also this kind of sense of mystery about the game that keeps me wanting to see more of it um so i had a great time with zero ranger i love the aesthetic too and the music is great everyone's favorite survival horror game pikmin is my number two nice uh another game this is actually one of the other gamecube games i just totally missed

when I was growing up. So it was cool to finally play and to have context for this huge Nintendo series. And then number one, probably not a big surprise, is Trails from Zero, which I've kind of been chipping away at for the whole year and is my entry point. Well, I guess I started with Trails in the Sky, but this is the one that just clicked with me faster.

and i'm in the final chapter and i'm sad to say goodbye to my friends but it's been a great journey uh so that's those are my goat toys at least there are sequels so yeah exactly i'll see lloyd and friends again yeah for sure uh yeah not gone and also not forgotten yeah uh cool go go toys Go Toys. All right. My list. Mine is not.

in order this year uh i think i usually do order it so i think we we swap places this year uh i just did mine in alphabetical order um starting with a game for the play date called bloom uh which i really love so bloom is a game uh where you are a uh it's kind of a interesting like idle game i would say in some ways uh you're just supposed to check in with it every day but you play as a girl who uh has

secretly dropped out of college to open up a flower shop without telling her parents or many of the people in her life. And you're basically just like managing the relationships between her and her parents and her partner and everyone else. in her life while also just every day going up to the roof and watering the plants. so you can then sell them in the flower shop. Wow. It's a game that takes, I don't know, like a couple weeks to a month to play through all of and it was a great month.

that I did that when I got the Playdate. I really loved Bloom. I think this is a little bit of a stand-in for a lot of Playdate games. I think the Playdate in general was just kind of a really exciting thing to finally get our hands on and mess around with this year. And even now, there are still some great...

slated for the horizon there's another season of games that they've announced like the play date is alive and well which is cool but bloom was i think one of the games that really stuck out to me you know most of the games came out before 2024 so they mostly counted there there is another game you had

Return of the Obra Dinn by Lucas Pope. I think somewhere on my list in my top 50 is Mars After Midnight, which is Lucas Pope's game, which did come out this year and was eligible. But yeah, Playdate still rocks. Very good. Next, Dragon Ball Z Kakarot. Oh, nice.

a redemption story yeah i couldn't believe how good it was and i i don't know what happened here as steven said it was a redemption story i played it initially and did not enjoy it really at all i found the first like 30 minutes to be so off-putting as to like make me want to never play it again and it

It literally wasn't until two of my co-workers who are big DBZ fans came up to me and were like, hey, have you played Dragon Ball Z Kakarot? And I was like, yeah, I didn't really like it. They were like, give it another shot and then come back and talk to us.

that i did and man i mean it's an unbelievable video game it retells the entire story of goku pretty much it has about a million and a half dlcs that extended out into not only like dragon ball super but now the new thing that is currently airing dragon ball z daima or dragon ball daima whatever it is uh they all get turned to babies i just watched first episode the other day

The first episode ends with a villain finding all the dragon balls and being like, I know how I'll eliminate these fools and then turns them all into babies. That's hilarious. It's amazing.

we've already I won't stop him we've seen Gotenks like you know that's true yeah baby Saiyans are equally powerful I mean Dragon Ball is baby Goku basically that's true but now there's a baby Vegeta Vegeta in the mix so and there's also a GT villain called baby that isn't a baby that's true yes you're right so now we have baby Vegeta and baby real baby Vegeta yes um

But Dragon Ball Z Kakarot, a game that I just was really, really blown away by once I got into it. I think the large-scale open-worldness of it, I think the side quests and the kind of... honestly like fan servicey here are characters from dragon ball who are all grown up now that you get to interact with and stuff like that like all of it just brought a huge smile to my face the whole time which is pretty much what dragon ball z exists for in my brain is like just kind of like

complete uh complete encircling in like good vibes and good energy, which was nice. Next up, Dragon Quest 1, which is a game I played also right at the beginning of the year this year that was literally January 2nd or something. I started playing Dragon Ball. Sorry, Dragon Ball. Dragon Quest 1. I played through the whole thing on the MiU Mini Plus.

while traveling back from San Francisco and had an unbelievable time doing it. I think it taught me a lot about Dragon Quest as a franchise. It taught me a lot about like... how many RPGs I think just need to like bow. in a way to dragon quest one and how much that team was able to get right on the first go around it's kind of miraculous it's like taking back a memorial in a way where it's like this is the blueprint of so much it's amazing how much

is there and how much is still used in like every game we play you know even a lot of the games that will be on our list this year uh are using the same systems that were invented in dragon quest one uh it's really it's an incredible thing i can't believe uh how cool it is

This is also a little bit of a placeholder for probably next year when I eventually finish Dragon Quest VI. That game is going to be on my GoToy list, definitely. But if I needed to pick one this year, it had to be Dragon Quest I because it's the one that I finished. That makes sense. a game by mist walker studios the last story yes um which i started playing while we were at pax i think earlier this year um

I've played a lot more of it now. It is a fascinating, weird game that feels completely lost to time. For those of you who don't know anything about it, Mistwalker Studios by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the guy who created Final Fantasy at Square.

and then went on to make a bunch of other games like Lost Odyssey and a game for the Wii called The Last Story, which is like... kind of a cover shooter but is also an RPG in a way you're hiding behind a lot of like rubble and stuff and then popping out and like hitting people with swords and the idea of magic being like

almost like a nuke going off in a lot of ways like anytime anyone needs to use magic like they kind of hover in the air for like 15 seconds before they can use the spell because it needs to like gather so much energy but that also means if you're deciding to have your spellcaster cast magic you need to like protect them from enemies because even like a bow hitting them or like an arrow hitting them could stop that that kind of strategy i think makes for a really interesting

system and the story is fascinating and so weird and like kind of based on aladdin but also not um i i appreciate that uh sakaguchi and everyone at miss walker decided to call it the last story because this is the one that feels the most final fantasy to me and it's a play on the name yes of all of all of the stuff that miss walker has done um except for Fantasian, which came out years later.

which i think is like actually just a final fantasy game with a different name yeah exactly a lot of ways but the last story to me feels like in that era on the nintendo we like a really big swing for what final fantasy can be which i think is the most interesting thing about mist walker in general is like Like every game is another take on what Final Fantasy can be, which is what Final Fantasy was supposed to be as a franchise.

from its inception and when was last story you said on the ways of like 2010 yeah in that era that was like right after ff13 so that was when i think final fantasy was also going into like totally new territory as well yeah yeah um

so that's the last story uh next up is minecraft which is um on the list i thought you were gonna say minesweeper i was like god damn it brendan i'll give a shout out to kyle star who did send me an interesting take on minesweeper this year minesweeper could have made the list steven

and then who'd be laughing it would be me and Kyle Starr and the inventor of that one anyway Minecraft made the list mainly because it kind of became an escape for me this year in a lot of ways, specifically thanks to the Discord and the Discord server that a bunch of people set up. to play Minecraft in that space.

that they've built is so welcoming and cool and uh very chill and i've enjoyed just kind of like digging into the earth and wandering around and seeing what everyone else is up to um i've really enjoyed being on the server while everyone else is like making life or death trips into the nether and like trying to extract the most intense materials they possibly can from the earth of the underworld while i'm like literally just kind of digging a little hole in a mountain

and I just see chat being like, they died, they died, they died, they died, they died. It's been a great time. So if you find my little spot, feel free to go in there and just dig whatever you want and do whatever you want there I dip in probably like once or twice a month and I have a good time playing Minecraft that's awesome next up One that I don't know if I talked about on the show. I might have brought it up, but I don't think I talked about it for real. Monster Hunter 3 Portable 3rd.

is a japan only version of monster hunter 3 that came out this might have been on the decade episode potentially or maybe in the whittling of it

Oh, yeah. Oh, you know what? I think it was because we ended up going with Freedom Unite, which is the one that everyone played. Monster Hunter Portable 3rd is specifically a PSP version of Monster Hunter 3 that... has like all of the trappings of what is in the main console version of Monster Hunter 3 but kind of distilled down into a PSP format but what's amazing is that there's a mod team who went in and then took the PS3 asset

for that game and modded them into the PSP version of it. So you can play on a PSP emulator the PS3 version of this game. And it looks... amazing and it plays wonderfully I love the town I think you and I have talked about this a lot in past years talking about Monster Hunter but like

so much of monster hunter lives or dies based on how welcoming the town it has the hub area exactly and uh this is like this kind of little nestled in the top of a like it seems like almost active volcano uh like old school almost kyoto s village that has like a wonderful hot spring in it as well so at any moment you could just like bail from your hunt and then just go like wade into the hot spring and just like sit for a while but

there's not a lot to say i mean it is just another monster hunter game that is very good but it's one that i put a lot more time into this year than i was expecting um because i wasn't expecting to play any monster hunter this year uh so

having this one i think just on the go um i played this mostly on my phone which is interesting um this is also the year the emulators hit the iphone so being able to play this mostly on my phone has been uh do you find you like monster hunter more handheld it's an interesting question um I think no if I'm playing with other people like yeah

I think I would always prefer to play Monster Hunter with other people and that usually means console. Yeah. My experiences playing Monster Hunter handheld with other people are also good. but that's just not happening as much anymore yeah um you know that that was happening a lot more in the in the 3ds era but now that we have like the switch and also the like monster hunter world and whatever the sequel to world is called i forget you know being console first

uh i think i'd always prefer that wherever people are is where i want to be yeah that makes sense yeah next up pokemon unbound oh yeah nice a rom hack for pokemon which launched fully in 1.0 this year um oh sorry not this year uh last year just

at its core taught me a lot about what Pokemon can still be I think in the same way that like Super Mario Brothers Wonder in a lot of ways feels like Nintendo stepping up to the plate and being like there's still a lot to do in this 2D Mario space it took this team of people who made Pokemon Unbound to kind of teach me like, yeah, they could still be making top down Pokemon games that are just as interesting and exhilarating and tell like cool, fascinating stories and include a lot of

quality of life ideas, but still be rooted in that thing that you grew up enjoying. I think that it doesn't just need to be a nostalgia play and i think pokemon unbound in a lot of ways is proof that there's a lot of space to kind of traverse there i totally agree yeah you mentioned too how a lot of romhacks can lean like edgelordy yeah

and it's like Pokemon Unbound feels like this other than maybe the Wii dungeon like this could have been a Pokemon game and even that dungeon is kind of tongue in cheek like it's not like if it was like a joke you might have been able to do in the 90s yeah you know like in red and blue

But yeah, I had a great time with Unbound as well. I made the mistake of trying to Nuzlocke it. Don't do that. It's so hard. Even on the easiest difficulty, it is not made for a Nuzlocke. Yeah. Actually, a ROM hack I'd love to see is like...

i'm sure they exist but kind of build in the nuzlocke mechanics into the game you know like already so it doesn't feel like you're having to like that does exist yeah um yeah there's there's a trifecta of Pokemon games or Pokemon ROM hacks that this one YouTuber made that which I've talked about on the show the legacy ones yeah they have Nuzlocke like built into it and the Emerald one just came out last week

also yeah i gotta play that yeah yeah um yeah unbound's great yeah unbound amazing game um highly recommend checking it out uh if you are playing it on an emulator uh make sure you're using the mgba core that's that's my one thing because uh then then you won't have uh

real-time real-time clock which you need um fun these last three because they overlap with your uh list as well oh cool um so i'll just kind of hit them real quick slay the princess yeah fuck yeah cool game yeah i totally agree with you about the ending yeah how do you feel about the ending I have a whole podcast episode about it. I really love that game and I think...

The ending does get very I don't know what the fuck is going on But in retrospect Having talked about it on .zip I feel like it it works more cool i'd also say like there are a variety of like ending endings yeah and they are very uneven in terms of catharsis like the one that i know you got is like by far my least not to make you feel bad no no it was pretty like pretty dour i got one organically that i was like that felt okay and then i looked up like because i had i kept a lot of backup saves

which i would actually recommend doing yeah um and uh i then i was okay with my backup save i can actually get three endings very easily so i did those three endings and there was one of those i'm like that feels like ribbon around the whole thing yeah you know yeah there's a few that feel that way and there are a few that are like kind of give you nothing which is kind of a brave choice i don't like i don't know it's a bad thing about the game but i do think that's worth maybe knowing ahead of

ahead of it if you want to maybe retry it that's also very classically visual novel where it's like there are a million bad endings right yeah Tokimeki yeah so slay the princess good video game uh i do want to play it with all the new additions um i'm gonna give that a shot probably next year uh so looking forward to that um and then up next

Tokimeki. Tokimeki Memorial. A game I played. So you said you played through it once and you're like, cool, that was my time with it. I think I played through it four times this year. Twice by myself.

once with my fiance and once with uh friends of the show pablo and callie as well um and i found that the group setting yeah version of playing tokyo memorial exhilarating so fun to be playing that in a huge group of people um not a huge group of people but just like there is something to be said about my time playing it like you know a hunch

in my bed like okay i'm going to i'm going to date this girl uh but there is i think something fun about being in a room full of people being like no no no do that do that do that yeah it's kind of like uh you ever play monster prom no it's like a party game version of a dating sim i didn't know there was a multiplayer yeah that's actually where i think that's the way to play it because there's sort of like a mario party angle so it's pretty fun yeah um but yeah i

i guess i lied i did play it twice the first time i played i got the like uh bad ending where you end up by yourself yeah like crying at the camera i feel it feels like you're supposed to get that first yes and then i ended up with the lonely stalker which felt canon yeah That kind of is. It feels like you spend all this time looking for the perfect person. They're literally right by taking notes. Tokyo making memorial.

great video game uh as you know i echo everything you said it's the blueprint for mass effect um and then last again overlap zero ranger oh fuck yeah that game just whips dude that's so good i mean that that game is so good and that that team is fascinating um i still have not played enough of uh void stranger yeah to really be able to like crystallize on it i know that there's you know it's

You just need to really chip away at it forever. And I think for me, I just need that game on a thing that is not my PC or my Steam Deck. Sure.

I would love to be able to play it like on the subway and I do know that there is a version of it for those of you who are like tuned into the handheld emulation world there's a version of it on portmaster now which means like i could get it on the sp which i just gave each thank you yeah they just got sps so you can play you play it on there steven if you want to oh fuck yeah that's a cool idea but yeah that's

That's my GoToy list. Bloom, DBZ, Dragon Quest, Last Story, Minecraft, Monster Hunter Portable 3rd, Pokemon Unbound, Slay the Princess, Tokyo Mickey Memorial, Zero Ranger. That's a great list. Wow. AJ, do you have a GoToy list for us? I do have a GoToy list. It is not... as uh definitive as the two of yours especially not yours steven uh because i did not rank these As you may know, I started a new podcast this year. Congratulations. Thank you.

called dot zip we play indie games that are less than like six hours our tagline is big games with small packages uh you should listen to it if you want but a lot of those games that we played were not from this year and took a lot not not took up a lot of i just have a hard time

leisure video game playing for myself yeah so all of my go toys are games that we have played for dot zip so i'm gonna kind of just like rattle through them yeah and like i'll talk about them but if you want to hear full thoughts

You can listen to the podcast. There's a whole ass podcast about it. I'm just going chronologically down the podcast feed. The first game is a game called Birth by Madison Carr. This game absolutely bangs. It is just like a point and click puzzler with a really beautiful art style about like... literally making friends or ideas that you have of loved ones or people that you care about. It's just a really beautiful game.

listen to the podcast about it uh eye of raw which is a game that i can recommend if you are okay with some technical glitches that maybe uh make you unable to actually finish the game. Yeah. But it's a game about being in a giant laser in the future. And your whole job is to get an email that says point the laser here and destroy whatever we're telling you to point it at. And it takes place over.

think like nine or like 12 years or something and you're waiting for one email the whole time basically yeah but it like it like every level there's like six no i think there's like nine or ten levels um and every level is like the moment you get the email oh and so it's like okay in in two months or whatever at this these coordinates you know we think there's going to be an asteroid so shoot the laser at this asteroid and then you have to

aim the laser and you know you can like speed up and slow down time so you can like i had a much more morbid version of this in my head i thought this was like you're a death star employee and every you have to just wait to like I think you're not wrong. It is basically a Death Star employee, but like you are you're getting like there's an asteroid coming. And then as the game goes on there, yeah, because on top of your emails, you're also.

you're also you have access to a news feed like a galaxy news feed and you can read about happenings in the galaxy and as the game goes on yes you know things happen in the galaxy it's sort of like papers please i guess

yes actually i would compare it to paper please in a way where you're kind of this government employee that is like kind of forced at the end of the day to like stop feeling yeah um if you want to like keep your job uh so that's a really great game that's available on itch most of these games are available on itch I will also shout out Lookouts, which is a browser game on itch, which is about you play as a transgender cowboy who it works.

or is is a member of a band of outlaws yeah and you're basically sent to case a town like we're gonna rob from this town but like go in and like scout it out and make sure whatever and then you meet up with another transgender outlaw from a different camp, I guess. And it's like the two of you being like, oh, yeah, we're here on the same job. You know, I hope that everything goes normal. And then you guys fall in love. And it's very nice.

That game is really good. It's in a lot of the bundles, right? I remember seeing the... It's free in browser, so I don't even know if it is. You don't even need a bundle. Yeah, I don't even think so, but you played this, Brendan? I did, yeah. You enjoyed it? Yeah, I love the art style. Oh, my God. Yeah, the art style, too.

show so good you're all birds oh this is the bird one yes the birds and dogs are the two main there are other animals but birds and dogs are like the two are there other animals come on those are all we really need sorry to the cat who is lurking i'll also just very quickly shout out how fish is made oh yeah um just very quickly because the game is 15 minutes yeah yeah um but it's like how fish is made is like one of the best

faith and what it means to believe in something in like the most succinct way possible for me i just like really really adore the approach that game has to like showing various the various different ways that people like believe in stuff I love the PS. This is another PS1-y aesthetic. It has that kind of Resident Evil 1 look. Yes, exactly. It's the team that went on to make mouthwashing. From this year. Yes. Yes. A lot of people's.

favorite game of the year yeah very very big game this year I wonder if that'll come up AJ I wonder if it will I will also shout out what else we got here oh I finished signalis for the first time this year i played through most of it yeah we talked about i think that was 2022 right

yeah i think so yeah i played through most of it the year it came out and then i guess just stopped i don't know um because i think i was playing it around goatee time maybe yeah it's a hard show going back to as someone who has done that because like it's hard to remember where you left off and it's like

Very unforgiving in terms of direction and inventory. Yeah. I have the green key. Yeah. What do I do with it? Yeah. Yeah. I will say for the most part that the map and I don't know if these were updates or not, but the map is like relatively possible. If you like you said, if you remember what the symbol.

mean and like what you're looking at yeah we talked about that with girl mode on on dot zip and that was a really great conversation um but the big thing that we kind of came to and kept coming back to throughout the episode is like, Like that whole game is about feeling and like there is a storyline in that game, but it ultimately doesn't super matter the specifics of the story because like it does leave stuff open ended at the end where like you can interpret it certain ways, but like.

at the end of the day that doesn't really matter how you interpret it because as long as you are feeling the thing that the game wants you to feel then you know it's done it's yeah i love my time with it i it's really cool yeah signals to me feels like kind of like how hollow knight is a game that is like clearly inspired by Dark Souls and Metroidvanias.

but has now become a new kind of source inspiration i feel like signalis is the same with like this kind of new wave of horror that's going it's pulling from like resident evil and silent hill yeah i feel like we're going to see signalis have a significant influence on other horror games yeah it's definitely one of the bigger hits. in that kind of revival. And I think that will be kind of a...

flashpoint in the future for games like this. It'll be like a reference. I can see people like, this is inspired by Signalis and X kind of thing. The Everything app. God damn it. I do want to see the game that's inspired by X and Signalis.

oh one game slay the princess yes shout out i did play the pristine cut though because we recorded that episode like two weeks after the pristine cut released yeah so we were like right there so that's the go toy of the year yeah i was gonna say yeah by default we've never picked one before but i think it is that yeah uh that game rocks i had a great time with it i'm um i got very much into more uh like visual novel style games than i have

sure ever this year especially with your podcast exactly yeah yeah yeah a lot of a lot of indie uh games are are in that style at least um but yeah uh

new that you both haven't already said. The art is beautiful. The music and the vocal performances are great. Yeah. It's just a very good game. It's also surprisingly funny. I would actually describe it more as like a dark... surreal comedy definitely in horror yeah although it depends which ones you get like yeah some of the princesses are like there's a very matt berry-esque

character you can potentially meet yeah that is just straight comedy yeah yeah um even there's like one very funny line that you can go down that i think they added to in the pristine cut I think it ends earlier in the in the normal version I made the narrator go that was my pride and joy yeah but there's one that is like it's

seems really funny and lighthearted for a while and then as you keep going down that line it's like actually this fills me with deep dread yeah and i mean that's the thing i think the game just balances tone so well which is really impressive yeah the writing is incredible so yeah yeah huge huge huge shouts out uh and then my final go toy this year is the yawg oh yeah which is a game that came out in 2011 i think that i think this is our oldest

uh game that we played for the show yeah um for dot zip for dot zip yes sorry uh which was suggested by a listener shout out to lou uh for for suggesting the aug um it's like The pitch of it is it's a digital board game that you can play solo or co-op. And that's like the easiest way to pitch it. But I think it's more of a... If you play it co-op or solo, like it is more of a visual novel kind of choose your own adventure style thing. And it is just.

this great kind of quick meditation on like what it means to be a member of society and of community and how there is always going to be a looming threat that you have no control over but the things you can control are how you

come together with the people in your community to like rebuild or or maintain whatever status quo you know positive status quo i guess in that way but it's just a really beautiful game that i was not expecting to have such strong feelings about when we had played it because I you know when I

downloaded it I was like this looks like a fun kind of cute little board game yeah because the art is by the same person who did the illustrations for gone home okay and is also just like an incredible illustrator in their own right It's just, yeah, it's a really beautiful game. I think it's pretty cheap on Steam usually, and you can finish a run in 10, 15 minutes. So that's the Yogg. And that's my go-to.

it's interesting playing indie games from that like the early 2010s yeah i was like around the time a lot of these game engines were becoming more accessible in terms of price and like learning it you know yeah like i remember seeing a graph of like just games released on Steam. Yes.

huge jump in like 2015 2016 which is cool i mean it does make it harder to get noticed but it is interesting to see like once indie games became more of like a household term what games are coming out in that kind of late 2000s early 2010s Yeah, yeah. Those are my Go Toys. Go Toys. Wow. Hi there, it's Kyle Starr, host of the Why Button Podcast.

This year, I had the great privilege and fortune of being asked to guest host an episode of the X-Strike Summer, Crosstrike Summer, Crystrike Summer, whatever you want to call it, episodes with my dearest friend, Dom Nero. That conversation ended up being...

primarily about parenting and gaming. We talked a lot about how we fit the hobby into our lives now and the different types of experiences that we gravitate to as parents. Which brings me to my game of the year, or GoToy rather, which is Kingdom Hearts. What I found great about Kingdom Hearts is that it's a

warm and pleasant experience from the story to the art direction to the music, but also because I'd played it a half a lifetime ago in high school. It's also fairly button mashy. And for those reasons, I didn't feel like I needed to be too focused. I could just let the experience wash over me.

But the best part about the experience is that I realized that the story beats are doled out over about one hour chunks. So like a book, I felt I could get in a chapter between nights. Truly, it felt like the perfect gaming experience for our parents and what I'll be looking for more of in 2025. Brendan, AJ, Steven, thank you for having me on the show this year. It was quite possibly the highlight of my year. Thank you guys so much for everything you do.

I know I always say it, but this show is a light in my life and I know is a positive force in this world. And I'm sure all your listeners feel the same. Thanks for another great year of Into the Aether and looking forward to the next one. Do you have a surprise for us? I have a surprise. And I've been debating how I'm going to debut the surprise, but I think part one is going to be a visual element. So sorry to the listeners, but...

I'm also warm, so I'm just taking my sweater off. I'm excited. This is part of the surprise. This is just kind of an additional surprise. That would be a good magician move. Like, just doves come out immediately. I'm wearing a shirt with a jacked Jar Jar Binks on it that says Mesa commit tech. I really like that. Shout out to Kim, co-host of dot zip and my very good friend for just.

sending this rogue to a bunch of friends. Sometimes you see a shirt. I think I think Sadie might also have that. Yes, I think I do think Sadie ended up with one of these as well. But that's not really part of the surprise. I was just like, I got here and I was like, I'm kind of warm, but I'm going to wait to take my sweater off. Yeah. my real surprise is a new segment that i am going to call the got yippies uh the game of the year if i played it

It's a speculation. I love this. Yeah. So huge shout out.

to oh my backlog this is great yeah i was i trust you but i was like i know we already have go toys do we need another acronym i know all you said was i have another acronym that's all i knew going yeah um yeah so shout out to uh in the discord for uh it's kind of suggesting like a channel for games that uh they wish that they could play their suggestion was not games general because it was just speculative talking about games that you wish you had played uh and shout out to uh

humdrum who had came up with the games of the year if i played it uh acronym i love it um so good yippy got yippy got games of the year if i played it it's my favorite tom angst movie uh so yeah i think just uh just a very quick it's one p and an i uh y i i p i year if i played it yeah got yippy got yippy um it's so good yeah my i was this

stinks i i was unfortunately able not able to screenshot my uh list before backlog.com went down yeah still down so it is still down but i can see i can see parts of it uh and i have i remember a few My first guy Yippee is... Haunty, which is a game that's on Game Pass right now. I just take a moment of silence for the first sentence. You are the only person who has ever said those words. My first got yippee is haunted. Haunty. Haunty, sorry. With two eyes. No, it's very good.

uh you just woke up forgotten gods you're like oh new communication we can be remembered um yeah Haunty is a game that I... had played on. Well, OK, I played a teeny bit of it, but not enough to actually have an opinion. That's probably the best level to have a guy. I think so. Yeah, because it's not entirely speculation.

But David from Video Game Potimism had played through the whole thing and really enjoyed it. And I really wanted to get back to it and basically start it over because I only played like, I don't know. 30 minutes of it earlier in the year. And I wanted to go back to it before today, but I could not, unfortunately. It's kind of like a twin stick shooter about being in a purgatory.

or like maybe it's hell I don't really know but it's also about like i don't know remembering and grief and love and like that's all shit that is like catnip to me yeah video games um who doesn't love grief and love who doesn't love grief and love that's what i'm saying uh two sides of the same coin um my next got yippy is uh victory heat rally

which is a game I played the demo for it's like this I guess 16-bit or like... kind of um i don't remember any of the old arcade racer games like like arcade cabinet um racing games but it's in that style like a kind of mode seven like it's is it pixelated yes okay got it yeah yeah yeah yeah so it's like you're behind the car and you're like you know whatever yeah I play the demo this of this I think it's like the mid-year next fest or something and it was

so much fun i there was like four races you could do in that demo and i did those four races like over and over again just because i was having such a great time uh and it's it's a game that's primarily about drifting um which is the thing that i love doing in mario kart and so like the fact that this like the main way to race in this game is to figure out the best times to drift. That is how you get ahead. It's just so much fun. It's such a great time. The art is really great.

The music is fun. What's it called again? It's called Victory Heat Rally. That sounds up my alley. Yeah. Yeah. Up your rally. That's up my rally. Guy yippee. Was it Guy Yippee? I'll figure it out later. next guy yuppie is a rise of the golden idol oh yeah um i'm i'm bummed i couldn't get to it this year but part of that was by choice because i really liked case of the golden idol yeah and from what i'd heard it's just like more of that

And like, I, you know, I, I, I don't know. I'm not like super precious about goatee lists.

spots i guess but part of me is like well i've already had a golden idol game on my list so i don't want to put it on i don't want to take a spot um and also it like it came out like uh only a few weeks ago um yeah so i didn't want to like have to cram i think it's like a 12 hour game um which is you know as someone who has a hard time making time for games i uh uh didn't want to have to stop working so i could play video game uh Neva is my next one From the creators of Greece I just like I

i don't have much to say about it really it just like looks like a really beautiful game um and i really enjoyed grease this year um i guess that's great an unsaid go toy um we're adding a lot of new unsaid go toys the trailer immediately made me like the trailer made me emotional and i'm like okay i guess i'm ready to cry at a video game it's like one of my favorite things to do is to cry at a video game um so that's never uh speaking of crying at a video game pine a story of loss

which is a game i saw some event sometime this year um which i know is super helpful but another place another time yes it's a it's like a hand-drawn uh like story game, I guess pseudo point and click it looks like I don't even know like what the gameplay of it is but it's this story of like a guy

who is like a lumberjack, I guess, or lives in the woods or something. And his wife has died or, you know, his loved one has died. And he's very sad about it. And so the game is about his story of loss.

um and it's just like looks so beautiful yeah uh and i am i imagine it's pretty short i don't know like i was laughing because like you could tell me anything i'd be like cool he's a lumberjacks in space he's got a jetpack feet yeah um no yeah uh but chicken who tells the time all the trees scream yeah it's uh they they ask why are you doing this yeah but yes that's pine a story of loss just a really beautiful game uh and then the longer games that I have not played.

this year uh dragons dogma 2 every time i heard somebody talk about dragons dogma 2 i was like wow that sounds i think there's a decent chance because dragons dogma is in our list of cilantro games where it's like it's hard to know if it's for you or not yeah knowing that you're a really big death stranding fan i actually think means you have a better chance of liking i don't remember which one of you on the episode i think you had made

a comparison close to that uh of like death stranding-esque if it was a fantasy game and like yeah baby i'm in let's go i think you'd be into it um yeah i uh i i just i knew that i did not have the like extra space to play this whole game no that's totally fair you know that's also a game you have to be in like a certain headspace for yeah yeah yeah yeah i had a hard time returning to it before absolutely yeah yeah putting the finalists together i also heard i listened to min max's

the min max awards yeah uh and they they do like a Best Moment is one of the awards they give out and one of the nominees for Best Moment was in Dragon's Dogma. when that just sounded fucking sick I love their awards categories it's very fun this is my first time listening I think once you learn how to high five your pawns that will be all you need yeah one of I think somebody's best no they did a best

thing and somebody wasn't yeah it wasn't in the high five wasn't in there which i was no it wasn't the high five but they said uh that your pawn pawn can catch you was one of the best things in video games and they said they to the point where they learned if you throw your pawn off a cliff

and then jump behind them, they will still catch you. And you will take no damage. I'm hoping that a lot of the pawn stuff in Dragon's Dogma 2 somehow makes its way to the new Monster Hunter. It feels like... there are a lot of fights in that game where where it's like you and your pawns against like a big ogre that feel like monster hunter fights yeah yeah um let me high five my cat yes exactly yeah um sorry i don't mean i don't mean no no yeah i told no i think it's

Also, Got Yippee is a nice positive rebrand of just what is regret. That's a great point. Yeah, I got yippees. I got yippees, yeah. I got yippees and no regrets. uh my next uh yippee is metaphor re-fantasio um a game that is actually i'm gonna say my next one too because that is persona 3 reload um i've never played a persona game i started playing Persona 3 Portable on my what I call my game and webcam phone because it's just an old phone that I still have lying around.

But then there was some update to retro arc or something. And now it just will not load on that phone. It is like too old. It's like an iPhone six or something. So I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah, it's it's a it's a bit of a bummer, but that's fine. I've got a new box that can play video games now. Great. Yeah, so I've never played a Persona game, and from what I've heard... metaphor and reload are like two very good entry points.

um i would say so and uh yeah i just i i just regret i don't regret no no you yippie yeah not being able to get to it um but it's just another they're long games that's the thing yeah and but but from what i've heard is like uh metaphor uh the way it handles like the the the length of stuff like it feels it feels better um listening specifically to uh i think matt Matt Horton and David, again, from Potimism. Shout out, David.

he had played metaphor and he has never he had tried to play persona games in the past and they just never clicked and he just said the way that metaphor was like laid out was much better for him speaking of someone who's finished every like

like Persona 3, 4, and 5, and Metaphor. Even, like, I don't find Persona's pacing to be an issue for me, but there are definitely stretches of all three of those games that... feel like they go on for too long or stretches that I would even just cut out entirely and metaphor it really feels like you're playing like nine seasons of a tv show like every like because it's usually built around a dungeon yeah and usually every chapter is like around 10 hours

that you can also beat that game in 70 hours which is long but like is actually impossible to do for persona yeah like so i do think it's

It's more concise. Yeah. Even though it is still a long RPG. Yeah. And then Persona basically for the same reasons. Everything I've heard about people talk about Persona is like it's... sanded off kind of the rough edges of persona and persona 3 was like a really good game to begin with so yeah i think um i mean you are a fan of three houses and mass effect so like i think that's a pretty straight line to draw through all those and i liked the first

like hour and a half of what i played of p3 portable uh emulated um So I think it's only really a matter of time, like once that goes on sale and I can pick it up on. I don't know. I think those types of games I want to be able to have handheld. Yeah. So his persona is reload on switch.

no it's on uh steam though if you have a steam deck no i would bet you anything it'll launch on the next switch next year yeah um it does feel like persona 3 reloaded metaphor both feel like okay this is this feels and looks like current gen yeah it's not like crazy but it does feel like a step above how persona 5 looked yeah i think just with games like that with like a lot of dialogue and a lot of stuff going on i want to be able to experience it like oh yeah it's

It's like half visual novel in some ways. I talk about this a lot on our Hotties, another acronym, our Handheld of the Year for NPC, but I don't think I would have finished

Persona 3 or played as much of Metaphor or Like a Dragon as I did were it not for the ability to stream it to a handheld. Being able to just like have a thing next to my bed that i could pick up and then like continue playing from the xbox right was so so helpful yeah so yeah i i totally get where you're coming from there i know you probably needed a good break from that style of game though after asynchronous

So I don't blame you for maybe waiting to play them. I had been talking to Kim. I don't remember if this is on our Zody or not. Zip of the year. More acronyms. We gotta stop. This is brutal. We're just picking them out of a hat now. We should just assign every letter to a thing, I think. Just get it all over with. You're my AJ of the year. Cheat cheese of the year. I don't know. But we had played 27 games at the time of that recording and it felt.

still like less of a lift than asynchronous was you're also devoting a whole episode to every session every session right which is a lot yeah it was great but it was i imagine it was a lot to do yeah yeah yeah um so yeah those those are my yippies my my got yippies nice thank you for this gift yeah i do like i draw the line at endless acronym hell i like got you i like got yippies a lot i have three i came up with three sure you're talking

Two of them I actually haven't played. One of them I have played, but I'll get to what's up with that. Two of them. Silent Hill 2 didn't get to it at all. feel like I would love that game. Unfortunate that I didn't. yeah uh and rise the golden idol also i just like i'm gonna love that game when i get to it exactly it was just it was released so late and i needed to be revisiting stuff and also it came out around the same time as indiana jones which like that's not a hard choice for me um

and the last one uh that i'll that i'll shout out and i only say this because it didn't make my top 10 but i actually think it probably would have made like top five if not top three had i finished it is like a dragon infinite wealth oh yeah um that game is fucking incredible yeah i dumped like

70 hours into it and I think I'm not even in the last act still um so i don't know i just i i loved all the side stuff so much that i dumped like 20 of those hours into don doco island i spent so much time with all those mini games that like yeah i just i think i burned myself out on it by playing so much of it so quickly that um that i that i ended up not finishing it and then when i went to go revisit it uh when i was putting my list together it was like i just

I think I'm going to need to take a longer break from it before I jump back in. Of course, by the time I finally do, there will be like two more yakuza games coming out yeah like any minute now it's probably out like today and then and then they announced what two more i think um during the game awards or something so there was one from the team yeah it's not confirmed whether

it's a like a dragon the game yeah uh what was it project century yes yeah anyway uh those are my got yippies silent hill 2 rise of golden idol like a dragon infinite wealth nice uh yeah i mean i i think this is our what our seventh this is our seventh go to um whoa at this point i i fully expect regret because you know we can only see so much yeah in a year Even if we have like a minority report screen of every game we would love, this is not enough time to get to everything.

um so i didn't really like if i had like a list of what came out this year i'm sure i'd have dozens sure uh the ones that just come to mind immediately are mouth washing i just didn't play it at all yeah i think that would probably resonate with me or at least i'd like to talk about it yeah it's a game i'd like uh indiana jones uh i just

haven't started yet yeah um i you basically pitched it to me right before i flew to new jersey yeah so i didn't have a way to play it here and uh also infinite wealth like infinite wealth is a game that i think it's possibly one of my honorable mentions um spoilers uh but i there were just so like this year began with like three giant rpgs yeah and then metaphor came out that i just like kind of had to accept that of all the ones i wanted to play that had the least

immediate pull yeah but i do really like it and i'm excited to play it eventually i i did kind of also feel like while i finished like a dragon uh yakuza 7 with Ichiban that game infinite wealth is kind of like an epilogue to Kiryu's story as well yeah so I kind of want to see more Kiryu before I go back to it yeah that's kind of where I am yeah I don't want to say too much but I

stopped playing at a point that becomes very kiryu heavy specifically which is what propelled me to go pick up yakuza 2 yeah um kiwami some say it's the trails into reverie of like a dragon yeah a lot of people do say that like unprompted I get text from people whose numbers I don't have saved to my phone.

also just random thought uh just a yippee not even a got yippee uh is uh they are localizing well they're releasing the trails in the sky remake next year oh and they're localizing a very bizarre psp fighting game that's the trails in the sky cast versus like the east characters oh yeah it's like power stone but trails so weird hell yeah we're gonna be we have a lot of weird categories next year yeah more acronyms this is my pizza of the year

Places are... Yeah, the Z's are... zip zop and dot dot dot um well thank you for that aj i thought that was a really i think it is worth acknowledging like what did i not have time to get to yeah yeah i think it's also could be a uh an interesting maybe not exercise, but for listeners that maybe they haven't listened or been like...

fully keyed into every single episode and they're like oh i wonder when they're gonna bring up this game and then it's like oh i actually never even played this game this year oh another one i want to pop a throw throw in pop up what um is is rebirth like i do think even though like we've been pretty critical of ff7 rebirth and like i didn't really enjoy it as much at least initially as much as a remake

I do want to finish it and I'm sure I will have a pretty good time yeah I just kind of knew like okay I'm already conflicted enough early on this probably won't make my top 10 but i do i do want to see it through i'm a big enough fan of it that i need to do that yeah totally yeah i have aether inappropriate takes about that show about that game so i'm just gonna i'm gonna abstain from talking about rebirth all right

um anyway anyway those are the yippies i do no i i think i think it's good to bring this stuff up um because we're about to do 10 through 1 like we're gonna go through the list and uh these it's worth saying every year extremely subjective uh we all have jobs that we do and uh this is this is the thing that we do on the side so we can't play everything you know and and like to aj's point not having played persona and metaphor those are like 200 plus hour games maybe

depending on how much stuff you're doing uh can't play all of them unfortunately but uh we tried to get to as much as we could the fact that on my goatee list i have uh 69 games that are eligible um that i that i ranked is like wild to think about considering we also played 100 plus gamecube games and then uh all of the other stuff that didn't make either of those lists So there's a lot of games we played this year. And I'm just...

by what the list is going to be. I'm like preemptively fascinated. Yeah, we were talking I think off mic that like we truly have no idea. We guessed each other's list. which I always get sent which I think is one of my great joys of doing the goatee it's just wild last year I like almost called everything which is scary you were like one off because of something I think I've gotten worse at guessing your list

time is what's happened this is the this is my worst guess yet i'll say that much i'm excited but that's a testament to i think this year and the variety yeah so i'm really excited shall we just maybe break here and start with 10 yeah yeah baby let's do that we'll take a break uh for you dear listener it'll be mere moments but for us it could be it could be five to 25 minutes yes it'll be a whole other year we'll come back with our 2025 goaties right after this bye

We're back. Oh, God. In the show. And it's time to start the list. I'm excited. I'm excited about this. As we already mentioned, Steven has to start. That is tradition. I'm excited to see how wrong my guesses are. Yeah. Let's begin, Stephen, with your number 10 game of the year for 2024. It's finally here. I like that we kind of warm up for this. It is nerve wracking, even though it's extremely low stakes. Anyway, my number 10 is a game we already kind of discussed.

Dragon's Dogma 2. This might be kind of surprising because I feel like this was a huge one for us.

at the start of the year i mean for one like there's just so many great games this year even getting 10th place is like yeah you know it's it's hard to limit it to 10 it's always harder than it sounds um dragon's dogma 2 as we mentioned is a hard game to return to yeah uh but it's definitely a game i wanted to have on my list somewhere because i'm like both dragon's dogma 1 and 2 are games that like when i'm in the right headspace there's truly nothing like it and

i think the best and worst thing about dragon's dogma 2 is that it is more dragon's dogma so like yeah i think part of the appeal of the first game is like it's this like artfully unfinished game that has so many interesting ideas that were like probably eight years too soon. Yeah. Even just the pawn system and the way that game uses the internet, another Death Stranding connection.

it's great like I love going back to the first Dragon's Dogma but I think a lot of people maybe had super high expectations for this one because it's like not only is Capcom getting another shot at Dragon's Dogma but also like it is modern day capcom and just since 2017 every kind of flagship capcom game has been not only great but like the definitive next step you know biohazard reviving resident evil as a franchise

then the remake of four being as great as it was monster hunter world street fighter six like every game has just been unbelievable so i think that was my angle and i was like also Elden Ring just came out and for a lot of people who don't really know what Dragon's Dogma is they're just seeing like oh man Capcom's making an Elden Ring right like

everything was set for this and I was like if they can pull it back a little bit yeah this will be a hit and it got weirder and stranger and almost more off-putting and I kind of love that because like

It does feel like an improvement in a lot of ways. I think ultimately it's more fun to explore and the world looks really nice. It's got a very interesting art style where I feel like... at least early on the level of technology in the world of dragon's dogma is like not it's somewhere between like

like bronze age and middle ages you know like it has this kind of like older feel to it yeah then a lot of other kind of standard medieval fantasy um where like maybe gunpowder is like just being introduced kind of thing um And I'm wildly conflating real arrows, but just sort of like flavors of fantasy. But yeah, I mean, I think that this game's like, the pawn system alone is really interesting. For those who don't know, the game begins with you making your own player character.

and making a pawn in this game you can also just download the standalone character creator which is like wildly powerful like it is it is a incredible tool i've seen people make like photorealistic shaggy

It's unbelievable. Yeah. I made my best Lazel from Baldur's Gate 3. Actually, but my real character is just like a regular character and then, or regular like... like create a custom character and then their pawn is a giant cat man nice like cat people but yeah the pawn system is really fascinating because basically you have like a sidekick who helps you out

and whatever the pawn experiences in your game they will remember both for your game and also when other people hire your pawn they'll be like oh i know a shortcut follow me and they'll take you there and of course it's all delivered with like oblivion-esque like

I'm good in crowds and nervous one-on-one they all like a specific personality and you always have a party of four so that alone I think kind of sets it apart from like the Dark Souls and and sort of the elder scrolls games um having that kind of like team of strange npcs

and the game itself is just like very hands-off in a way that is similar to elden ring but almost more chaotic and that like elden ring is hands-off but like they kind of like the the fights feel very orchestrated and like there's certain set like Like everyone's going to have like a specific experience when they encounter this place for the first time. Yeah. Whereas Dragon's Dog was just like, I don't know.

like an ogre might just show up in the capital and you just have to deal with it yeah yeah the comedy of that game is unmatched specifically I think when you make it to the second continent in particular like the difficulty ratchets up

to a degree that I don't think anyone will be ready for. I don't think there's a way to be mentally or literally in-game prepared for how hard it's about to get. For example, One of the ways that you can traverse in the second continent are these like cable cars that just kind of like connect. large uh large like mountain kind of uh villages and stuff

But there are also like giant eagles that will just swoop down and destroy the cable car while you're on it. Pretty much any time it sees anybody trying to traverse that.

Like, why put it in the game if you're incentivizing people to literally never use it? Because as soon as the eagle crashes into the cart, of course... one of the things it's so funny to see what they focused on when making Dragon's Ogma 2 but like one of the things they focused on are like incredible destruction physics so the cable car

explodes into splinters of wood and your character and all of your pawns literally belly flop onto the ground like five stories below and die and it's funny every time or like uh there's a system with like uh carriages where you can hop on a carriage as like the game's way of like your first form of fast traveling and you can either just like sit in the back and like wait the whole time or you can close your eyes and then open them when you think you've arrived.

and sometimes you'll open your eyes and the everything is under attack and you're like oh i'm glad i woke up yeah so there's just decisions like that that make this game one of a kind that could also be very frustrating if you're not really like connecting with those um i think i think just the act of exploration and discovery in this game is is remarkable that's kind of what i come back to and what makes it hard to return to is like it's hard to remember like

where i was what i was currently looking for because like even though there is a slightly more interesting narrative this time the first time like you're not really playing it for the story i think at least for me what i get at dragon's dogma too is like Just choosing a part of the map that I want to go to and charting the best course there. It's a little bit like Monster Hunter where that game is all about like, okay, what hunt do you want to do and how do you prep for that fight? This is...

kind of an even more hands-off version of that where it's like where do you want to go and how are you going to get there because you're going to need to have like camp supplies you're going to need to like yeah do all this up and i like that loop a lot um i just found like it's it's a hard game to like dip in and out of It kind of has to be like the thing you're playing. Yeah. Cause if you forget like even subtle mechanics, then.

It's just over. I think what's nice about Dragon's Dogma 2 being so similar to the first is that it will like kind of perennially be that game that you could just dip into whenever, right? Like Dragon's Dogma 1, every once in a while, I just re-download it on my Switch and I'll play it for like 10 hours that week and have a... great time and i think going forward that'll probably be the case with the second one i totally agree

i'm trying to think of what one and two kind of do differently like they do feel like they exist alongside each other yeah i do think two sands off some edges when it comes to like building your character i like that the game encourages you to switch what vocation you are and I really like the various jobs like they all feel really distinct I really like the feel of an archer and building towards magic archer that's really fun see I thought this game was great I don't think it the most

critical i can be of it is like it didn't feel like the definitive next step of the series yeah but it feels like a really good iteration of it yeah um and so for that reason i had to make my list so that's dragon's dogma 2 dragon's dogma 2 my number 10 this is exciting now that we're in the moment i'm like oh yeah this is we're doing godie this is fun um okay my number 10 is very similar to magic arena making your go toy list where it's like you just need to acknowledge

what you've been spending time with this year in some ways and really think about like, why did I spend so much time with this? And does that mean it makes... the list and if so where um so my number 10 is a game exactly like that which is earth defense force 6 oh yeah hell yeah which i am like blown away is my number 10 when all is said and done uh but when i looked at like when i

uh year in review like steam recap xbox all the wraps yeah playstation wrapped all three were like you played a lot of earth defense you played a lot more defense force than you thought it's actually only playstation and steam but i i got it on both platforms um and just played like a ton of that

game and it strangely became like my audiobook game this year i just like i listened to a lot of audiobooks this year and earth defense force 6 was like the constant companion during that um for those of you who haven't listened to the show or don't know earth defense force its franchise has existed for a long time hence this being the sixth one there's like the six millionth one really because there's been like a hundred spinoffs and stuff Another got yippy. Earth Defense Force.

World Brothers 2 is another Earth Defense Force game that came out this year. Wow. That launched on Switch. exclusively and i downloaded and didn't even start um also no we don't have visuals here but i just need to say got yippy really takes off as an acronym when someone slaps their knee and points that was really that really completed it for me um

But anyway, Earth Defense Force is a franchise where you are a team of like Starship Troopers-esque people like taking out giant bugs. That's what the franchise has kind of always been.

until some of the more recent entries where they've kind of expanded the bugs out into other creatures. So Earth Defense Force 6 opens with you and a small... recently hired split I almost said splatoon recently hired platoon of people who are like like lawyers and people who used to be like restaurant chefs and stuff who are like not primed for this, but the world has ended and you just need everyone you can get.

who are like eight stories tall hell yeah rocks the guns that they give you like you use them like blast off their legs so they're just like kind of crawling towards you like like house of the dead zombies but you know again they're eight stories tall so that's not a bad comparison too in terms of the tone like it's so campy and self-aware yeah yes um i think

this game is fascinating to pair specifically against like one of the biggest games of the year definitely which is Helldivers 2 which is going after a very similar idea you know that's a game which I was really looking forward to. I was a big fan of the first Helldivers and I do like Helldivers 2 a lot. I mean, it made my top 50. So, shout out.

But, you know, that that is a game that strangely enough, I found myself kind of detracted from the more I experienced the online play where I started to get paired up with other people. And I. felt like I was like weighing the team down yeah in Helldivers 2 and I'm like this game is so silly and it's supposed to be so silly that the experience of feeling like guilt while playing it because like I'm not doing what is correct like quote unquote from the meta perspective was like

i don't want to feel that while playing something this stupid yeah um i love a lot of what hell divers does i think that game is incredible i mean there's some there's some really spectacular things happening in there and i'm always down to play it um but if i'm going to be playing one of them by myself specifically hopping online to grind out missions. I would much rather be playing Earth Defense Force 6. I love that this franchise is constantly two generations behind graphically.

So they could just pull off having like 6,000 ants on screen at any given time. And that adds to the tone as well. I think there is a weird, like I think Helldivers 2 is also a great game and it looks great, but almost being a AAA polished experience like detracts.

from the camp in some ways it does i totally agree with you yeah yeah in earth defense 4 6 is just like totally leaning into it i think this game has like multiple magic tricks it took like six hours to hit the title screen when you there's like there's this one moment i won't say a lot about the mission but there's a mission where there's like a big flying saucer that comes down and like what they what they throw at you is like totally new and when that round

of combat ends the screen flashes white and it says welcome to earth defense force and then the whole game changes the menu changes the title screen changes the music changes like everything that you use to interact with the game changes

And you come out the other end now going into the next mission, which is like... sequentially like 30 or 40 I don't know and your character looks different and it's like years later and you're taking on like different kinds of combat holy shit and your armor looks different everything is new it's It's amazing how many times

game yeah uh and i just i wasn't expecting it because this is this is a franchise i've heard about for a long time but i've never really like thought to connect with i'll give a shout out to our friend chris plant who like is kind of the ambassador for defense force in my mind um But even in his pitching it to me, never did it come up like... not only is this like a supremely stupid game that you're going to have a lot of fun with but it has really interesting ideas about like

like narrative in some ways and and and intertwining narrative with the way that the player is interacting and that seems new to this one i actually saw a backlog review for this game that said holy shit a story yeah yeah well what's what's interesting is like

Like it picks up where the last game left off. Sure. And that's never happened before. Oh, yeah. So the idea even of like what you did in Earth Defense Force 5 matters in Earth Defense Force 6 is like completely uncharted territory. And in some ways adds. to how hilarious it is yeah uh which is which rocks um yeah i mean i i played i played a ton of this game i love it to death

I will play a lot more of this game. I already have gone and downloaded Earth Defense Force 5 just so when I inevitably finish all the missions in Earth Defense Force 6, I can go backwards and play it. but yeah I love this game and it's my number 10 great pick wow it's a fun pick yeah so everything you've ever said about Earth Defense Force six yeah just makes it sound like the most fun game from 2009 like it's yes it has the uh

the best adjective Brennan's ever made, PS3E. Yes. It does feel like a game you would rent all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why don't I just buy this? Right. Yeah. My number 10, and I've been shuffling back and forth.

many many games in this slot uh but i've settled on my number 10 being arctic eggs oh yeah a game we did talk about on dot zip i promise not all of these are dot zip games uh it is a game originally made for the first big mode game jam big mode being the publisher headed by a video game donkey it is

a game that is basically about a post-apocalyptic future where the game starts like kitted out kind of like SWAT soldier guy and he basically says something to the effect of you fucked up so bad the boss took away all of your ability to do anything besides make eggs yeah like you can't you can't talk you can't literally cannot speak or do anything else besides make eggs for other people and that's your punishment yeah there is no elaboration on that for throughout the rest of the game.

tell you i'm picturing that i think you should leave a game when you say that yeah i know it's not um oh yeah yeah feed me yeah feed me i'm not in trouble at honestly like i when i first heard about arctic eggs that was also my first thought and then when i looked it up and i started watching like a playthrough of it on youtube i was like oh

this is not that i kind of wish it was yeah um sorry interrupt but no you're good uh but it's like this just supremely stylish game i would say i really love the art style it's got that kind of ps1 aesthetic but they put this effect or filter or something on all of the models so they're all kind of just like bubbling all the time and like move like they're not like actually bubbling but their models are just like

look wobbly yeah despite them being like solid shaped people um it's very very interesting uh i think the designs are very cool like the designs of the soldiers or cops or whatever is like their their uniforms are interesting and they have like these like

gas masks on that are really interesting and stuff like that but the gameplay of the game is you make eggs of course but as you are like walking around this area talking to people and you're helping you know you're basically feeding people is what you're doing there are people who are like oh can you make me some eggs but also can you throw I'm gonna throw a cigarette in there because I like the flavor it adds which mechanically is like,

now you only have until that cigarette burns out to make these eggs and so like it's introducing stuff like that where random people will be like oh actually also can you cook me this can of sardines at the same time and then you have to cook the sardines until it pops open. Are the mechanics like cooking mechanics? Yeah, so it's a first person view. Okay.

and you when you talk to somebody they tell you what they want and then a frying pan shows up in the center of the screen and you place in the objects that you're going to be cooking so you kind of have control of like where you want in the pan

uh not really uh in the way naming other cooking games yeah um it's it's i would say it's pretty wholly unique in the way that it handles cooking because it is mechanically i i didn't play it on controller uh i played it on mouse and keyboard and the the mouse You can use the scroll wheel to like change how like choked up you are on the handle of the frying pan. And then you actually use the mouse to like tilt the pan left and right.

And so like in order to flip these eggs, because you have to flip them, you have to tilt forward to let them slide to the edge and then quickly tilt back.

to have them flip out of the pan and then land uh and so if anything falls out of the pan you have to start that that bit over but they're all like you know they're they're those challenges are short enough where it's like if it restarts it's not usually that big of a deal i think like thematically it is kind of a game in some ways about nothing uh over and over again throughout the game this question is a Seinfeld baseline yeah uh throughout the game

the characters keep asking this question. Do you think you can fry an egg on Mount Everest? And it like keeps coming back up in different ways through everybody you're talking to. And at the end of the game, I'm not going to spoil what happens. I decided as I was saying the sentence. But just like that question coming up so many times.

and like the way that people respond to it of like i i don't know why would i care about that yeah uh or being like oh that's a really interesting question like the whole game is about how it is good to ask questions and to just like have

There's no inherent value of having that thought. And there's also no way you're ever going to find out if you can fry an egg on Mount Everest. But having those thoughts and going through... If you want to think about the physics... of it and stuff and like the elevation of it and blah blah blah and like is it even possible to like you know whatever

Like that is as valid as just like thinking about that question as like a silly little thing that you do with your friends sometimes. Like I just think it's a game that is it is absurd in a way that is like pointing at the absurdity of just like.

life in general in that just like existence is kind of goofy because it's like we can have these questions of like what is the meaning of life and like you can come up with your own answers but there will never be a definitive answer really or like you'll never find an answer for that but just like thinking and experiencing life

while having that like question in your head will like fundamentally change how you interact with the world in some ways. Yeah. And so like having this question of like, can you fry an egg on Mount Everest is like, I don't know, it's just like another one of those questions. It's just like, it's a thing that floats around and it influences the way that you maybe interact with the world.

as goofy as that might sound there are some like really profound moments in this game both like like narrative not narratively but like writing wise of just like wow that was like really beautiful that somebody said but then there's also this there's one moment that I want to point out And it's like, I don't know, it's kind of hard to spoil this game because the whole thing is that you're flipping eggs.

but there is one game or there's one there was one moment where you talk to this guy uh after you know he's like a third of the way into the game and he's like i see how people react when you make them food and he's like a fish he like cooks fish he's like i see how people react when you cook them food and they look

so happy and nobody ever looks that happy when I make them a meal can you please show me how you do this and the game it doesn't flip perspective but it flips the pan so you are now looking at somebody else controlling the pan but your controls don't reverse so left is still left but now you're looking at it and so it tilts to the right you know yeah and it's just like that moment to me is so emblematic of this whole experience of just like existing of like

you can be really good at a thing but as soon as somebody asks you to like show me how to do that yeah it becomes like you can still see the objective like you get it and you understand how to interact with it but it's like so hard to actually like wrap your head around at the end of the day um

and like that one specifically like they throw like three eggs in that pan or something so it's which is goofy um but it's like it that's it's not nothing like you can make one tiny mistake and flip an egg out of the pan and you're like fuck i have to start over but i think i did that one the most times but i was so determined

to get this guy to have cooked eggs yeah that i like stuck with it and it was just like really satisfying at the end of it when he was like thank you so much like i i understand whatever and so just like just i don't know it's it's a game about uh making eggs and that uh in a pan that also has a bullet and a cockroach in it but also it's like it is a game about you know existence and and like how

the literal act of feeding other people but also the the act of just like doing something for somebody like will you know metaphorically and literally in this case like feed them in some way you know like mentally emotionally spiritually whatever so it's just like it's just like a really beautiful game and it takes like an hour and a half to play and uh yeah that's why it's my number 10 arctic eggs arctic eggs

Arctic eggs. As you were saying all that beautifully, the sun like poured in. Yeah, it was amazing. I was like, damn. Wow. Want some eggs. That's what I set up, baby. Hey everybody, this is Kyle from 7th Beat Games, one of the developer guests from Xstrike Summer. 2024 was a really busy year when it came to games. It was impossible to actually keep up with everything. But there were a few games that really resonated with me in particular. In Wilmot Works It Out, I really connected with the

relaxation of putting jigsaw puzzles together, decorating rooms, and seeing the joy of making mundane connections with someone in your community. In another game, Rabbit and Steel, I finally got to... see the appeal of chaotic MMO raids thanks to the developer streamlining them down into the form of a 2D roguelike. But despite those and so many other great games, I have to say that my game of the year was.

Fields of Mystria. Fields of Mystria shares a lot of similarities to other farm sims like Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley, but It was the little differences that really... spoke to me in a big way. The pastel color palette and 90s anime style were exactly up my alley. The way that you progress through the game, the way you unlock new skills, continue the story and unlock new buildings. feels much more forgiving than in other games like Stardew. And most importantly,

The writing of all the different townspeople had me genuinely laughing out loud. I really adore how the developers have made these villagers feel like they're real people. They eat and drink together, they hang out, they tease each other. and they even play their own version of D&D on the weekend. It makes Mystria feel like a real place that would keep on surviving, even if you weren't there playing. Thank you so much to AJ, Brendan, and Steven for having me on today.

to talk games, and to share a little snippet of what it's like to try to make a living as an indie game developer. It's been really fun to watch the podcast grow over the past few years, and I'm really excited to see where it goes in 2025. Until then, I will see you all on the TWG Discord server. Have a Happy New Year. Are we at number nine? Number nine. Well, my number nine is a game called the Unicorn Overlord. Hell yeah. You made a shocked face.

unicorn overlord is the latest from vanilla where who previously gave us 13 sentinels and in many ways this game is the complete opposite of that game uh where and actually it's interesting to look at vanilla where's uh past games Because in a lot of ways, Unicorn Overlord feels more like...

you would guess they would eventually make this before they would make 13 sentinels yeah um because you know their earliest game i think well i don't know i don't know if it's earliest but like the one that i've played that is you know in their history is dragon's crown which is like

an arcade beat-em-up and then after that was Odin Sphere which you can kind of tell there's like 13 Sentinels a-brewin' when you play that game because that's like a sort of mash-up of fairy tales and I didn't get very far into it but there is like some semblance of like oh there might be kind of like a meta story happening here yeah 13 sentinels is this really narratively ambitious

sci-fi game which is atypical of vanilla wear and that game also is like a mashup of every different sci-fi series and trope all in one game but ends up kind of interrogating nostalgia and asking like literally what happens when your childhood is nostalgia yeah are our own memories a construct i mean that game like i think the first half if you just go into that game blind 13 sentinels

the first half is just being like bombarded with like just jaw-dropping moments of like what is happening in an intriguing way yeah and then seeing how it all eventually connects is really thrilling and what makes that game so unique And that game is largely a visual novel with some RTS tower defense gameplay thrown in. And they're very much divided.

if you want more on that game we got a whole episode about it and there's a whole season of asynchronous aj's old show about that game as well yeah um so unicorn overlord is basically like a love letter to both fantasy and also to tactics games so it does feel like an homage to Final Fantasy Tactic tactics ogre ogre battle um basically any any game in that sub genre if you want to call it that like is part of unicorn overlords dna

um and the reason i say it's the opposite of of 13 sandals is like the story is non-existent the story is like i'm a prince and there's a bad guy and i would love to form an army and there's like this weird recurring theme of redemption in it where like you'll go to like you know there's

this really beautiful like a world map where you're like walking around as a lane and then you can spot like okay there's like where the battle will be happening and then you can select to start the battle and most battles are like it opens and a villain's like I will burn down this town. I can't wait to do that.

i'm so sorry i was really hungry i don't know i just thought it'd be kind of fun uh and then you can choose to kill them or recruit them or they join your team yeah it was so abrupt that i initially was killing all of them so i don't trust this turn yeah uh and then and then

it gets a little bit more nuanced as you go and then i i realized like there isn't really a grander story happening here it's just sort of like oh i can get a new unit yeah uh so i just why not i found that i always let them join my party if they ask and I always let them escape if that was the other option. Yes. Because the versions of this are either kill them immediately or let them join your party or let them escape.

or kill them immediately yeah those are kind of the two versions of that question and if you let them leave usually that will actually lead to some kind of narrative moment which is fun like because you'll always run into them again and they'll be like I'm still evil

yeah even though you let me go which is fun it feels because they've been working on this game alongside 13 sentinels and for i think like 10 years maybe yeah and you can tell with the level of like illustration and animation it's it's amazing but i wonder if there was maybe like a grander plan for that whole system like there there are some really interesting moments like for example there is a character early on one of the main characters gets kidnapped like

a couple missions in um and so one of the big overarching quest lines is like go rescue her but you can actually just never rescue her and there's like a version of that character and that and an ending for that game that are unique to like

Like going to the final boss, having never rescued that character. Yeah, that's really cool. I don't think most people are going to do that. And I don't know of many other examples that are like that, which is why I think maybe there was like a bigger plan of like.

sort of a different route like the title suggests that you can be the overlord of the unicorn kind of thing um so so the the that doesn't really bother me though because like while the narrative is very simple it's also like it's not really trying to be anything grander than it is I think it's fun to see who the new characters are and go to new places

like i think the world is rich there's like different kingdoms for like angels and elves and like werewolves so that's all fun um but really where it shines is is the combat because like it's this really interesting blend of rts and auto battlers and the way it works is like you have a unit of up to five characters that like form one unit on the map so whereas like in fire emblem event in some games you can like double them up like with partners uh but like

usually it's like okay i'm sending like lucina over there to fight this enemy in this game if you were to send one of your units it's like a little army of five characters and then the battle plays out automatically and within your unit you can change like okay this

it's sort of like gambits in ff12 where you can say like okay use this move if the enemy has less than this amount of health or like only use this move if there's a group only use this move there's like this type of enemy and that tinkering like you're kind of making a little engine for each unit and it is really thrilling to see that pay off and you can even do like scrimmage battles between units to see like okay how would this unit perform against like

all mages or whatever so all that's really cool there are a couple things about the design of battle that i'm a little bit critical of like basically i found and i've seen this in the discord too the game is on the easier side like i was playing on uh, the tactician difficulty, which is between normal and hard. So I guess it's like very normal. Yeah. Um, basically like that.

That overall has felt pretty good because I'm not really looking for this experience to be super challenging because it's a new system. I only really bump up the difficulty if it's a system I know very well over the course of many games.

but it does sometimes feel like i'm given all these options of like equipment and the equipment gives them moves they wouldn't have otherwise and you're doing all this like fine tuning when in reality I find I can kind of brute force a lot of the matches so that's a little thing and the other thing too is that like

the lost conditions uh i think it's like if your base is captured if you lose all your units and you don't have points to summon a new one or if the time runs out and nine times out of ten i lose because the time runs out but there is an item that you can use so the time will run out and a lane will be like oh man and then it's game over but you can use this item that will just

like fully restore the time meter and you pick up right where you were so when i first saw that i was like oh this must be like a really rare item it's like basically get a jail free card yeah i have like 36 of them so basically whenever i've run out of time i just say like no just keep going yeah it's on one hand i don't really like time limits i don't mind that that's an option and i do know that on harder difficulties

the amount of items you can use so maybe it's like do you save one to use or do you use a potion in your time of need yeah it's only an issue because it kind of like i do like the the idea behind having a time limit where it's like

Like the challenge may not be to defeat all the enemies. It may be like, you've got to be efficient. You've got to know like, okay. And then suddenly that adds another layer of strategy that is kind of just completely undercut by that item being so plentiful. Yeah. And I guess you can choose not to use it, but like.

Most of the time, it's such a slim margin that I'm like, I'm not going to do the whole level again. I have a job, unicorn overlord. So... that that's kind of the only thing that holds it back from being maybe like one of the best tactics games ever made yeah so it's like definitely a nitpicky thing but i love the combat i love the music i love exploring the world map it's very just

It scratches part of my brain to like go to a town, save it, you know, through battle and then give it supplies so that I can station a guard there and then unlock more items in the shop. Like does the act of kind of reclaiming the world from the evil Galerius.

is really fun. And I think, you know, again story is really nothing special but i do think it's like it's always fun to see a new character i think they might give you too many i have like 60 what's the is it 100 it's it's at least like 60 something yeah and you can also recruit characters that are like generic

uh you know like you might you might meet a character who is like oh i'm i'm the canonical knight but you can also just make knights at the barracks if you want to have a unit that's like three knights and a healer or whatever um so i'll just say i think it's a fantastic tactics game really enjoying it and uh

I just think it's also a hard game to go back to because there's so many options. Yeah. It's the kind of thing where you have to want to spend an hour in menus, but then see like the result of that. So yeah, I had a great time with it, but number nine for me.

yeah this was uh this was a lot lower on my list which i'm kind of surprised by because i did play it a lot and i really did enjoy it a lot but again you know this year is wild um but uh I think it's a game that does kind of get caught up in its own ambition at times like you tried to do too much I think maybe whereas like when you have nailed the combat the way they have it's like go all in on that I don't need

60 named characters with all of their own plot lines happening i think i mean this is subjective but i think there's a version of this game that's like 12 characters with maybe one or two fewer mechanics that's like 10 out of 10 yeah i do think there's something to be said also by the fact that it came out after 13 sentinels and when you come off some such a narrative heavy game yeah

I think that does kind of litter the ground with a little bit of expectation that Unicorn Overlord kind of isn't interested in meeting at all. No, I mean, they were developed like kind of alongside each other. So I do think it feels like three houses and engage in that.

like they're really just going for different things totally i'm interested to see what's next because yeah this game's existence feels agnostic of 13 sentinels yeah being a thing other than maybe like there is a menu where you can like chronicle like the order of scenes but like

i don't need to re-watch like sorry i burned down the town exactly you know yeah right also there's a really funny thing where you can like go to a tavern and like you know order food that's like i love this you know they they like over animate like a jiggly omelet you know and everyone's like yummy and it's like yeah it's just like screaming like they've never eaten before yeah i will say some of the there are like little support scenes you can unlock and some of them like

i think some of the characters have at least at the level of like an older fire emblem it's okay i i enjoy like i think um lex lex and chloe are two characters you get early on that are kind of like clearly like the underdogs of the group and like

are very ill-equipped for this battle yeah and seeing them kind of like grow as characters and also like get better as units it's the donald thing which i always love so yes yeah i had a great time with the unicorn overlord and if you were like a fan of this genre I still don't think we've like like there are other types of games that have gotten like okay harvest moon fell off for a bit then we get starter valley and now we have a million life sim town farm games

there's still kind of a big spot for this style of tactics RPG yeah you know so I think unicorn overload I definitely think will will if you like this genre you'll love this game yeah it's like a must uh also holds a special place in my heart because my fiance has played it twice all the way through this year once on i think tactician and then once again on whatever

difficulties right now i'm i'm you can do it in any order really and that's i think the cool thing about this game is they let you kind of like they tell you what the recommended level is but you can just try to make it work if you want yeah I actually that's one of my bigger questions about it is like they let you just go fight the last boss immediately and I wonder how

even feasible that is yeah i think i mean there's probably a way to cheese it i'm sure there's like a youtube video that does probably yeah i think there's a point where it feels a lot like Breath of the Wild, where you can actually go to Ganon at any time, but if you don't do all the mythical beasts, it's going to be impossible. I guess my thought is like...

In Breath of the Wild, I can understand that because it's mostly pattern recognition and dodging attacks. There's a lot more active combat happening there, whereas in a thing like this, it is kind of stat-based. I wonder... how early on technically can you go fight galerius it does feel like you probably have to at least be where i am or like you've done like i've done the elf

continent the like sort of mountainous continent now i'm in werewolf land yeah it's also hilarious one of the shopkeepers in that country is just a tiny rabbit on like the shelf of a store i love it it's great um and there's an angel continent that i have yet to go to and then you go back and fight hilarious right

So I'm curious if I do like a, I don't know if there's a new game plus, but if I start on one of the harder difficulties, if the time limit will suddenly work better for me. But yeah, it's a great time. That's Unicorn Overlord. Number nine, baby. Steven's number nine. My number nine is a game for mobile devices called Gun Show. Oh, hell yeah. Gun Show is a game by somebody named Arnold Rowers.

and is a very, very, very classic hex-based roguelike game that I just dumped like an unbelievable amount of time into this year. i i wrote a post on my blog like earlier this year that was basically just the iphone games i will literally never delete off my phone and gun show is absolutely just one of them kind of forever now it's um you know how like the iPhone has the app library where it like surfaces what apps you like gravitate to the most.

gun show is like always just the top left like easily accessible app in the games category for me because i reach for it all the time like when i'm on the subway and i don't have the ability to like sit down and like pull out a handheld and like play a actual you know like

handheld game um i will always reach for my phone and play gun show instead the way it works is you are just a guy kind of wandering through the west and you're given you're given this like grid uh of heck based icons and your options are either move to one of the grid pieces around you.

or shoot in the direction of one of the grid pieces around you. And there are enemies that have a bunch of different abilities. So like some of them just have, you know, the same gun you have and they can shoot two spaces away. Some of them will have long rifles that can shoot across the entire gameplay area.

Some of them will throw bear traps on the ground and then kick them at you. Some of them will strap dynamite to themselves and try to blow themselves up next to you. But the important thing about this as like a very, again, classic ass roguelike is... you move first and then the enemies all move in a random order and you need to just be accounting for like every single possibility and I think it's a game where I felt early on like it left too much up to chance.

Although I appreciated how paired back the amount of upgrades you got on a level-to-level basis, this is not a game where you're carrying over progress between runs or anything. But... But when you finish a level and there's, I think it's seven levels per run, the seventh level ends with like a big boss fight. Each of those levels will give you some kind of upgrade either to your abilities as like a person moving around this space.

or what your gun can do um so it'll be like yeah you can shoot through walls now or uh you can jump over walls or you can just jump two spaces in a direction or

you have the ability to kick something five spaces away from you. So if somebody gets too close, you can just kick them into like... a cactus that's like three tier three icons away and then they just like get kind of pinned up against it and die like a cartoon but I found that the limitations in the amount of abilities and upgrades you could get actually did serve

the the learning cycle of the game which i think is one of the most important parts of every roguelike that i've ever played at least is like the kind of getting acclimated to the language of what the developer wants you to understand and like learning the ins and outs of what is possible like that possibility space i think is interesting

but the fact that all of the enemies move in a random order so they will telegraph what they'll do on the next turn but you don't know in what order that'll happen and sometimes those things will interact with the environment because so much of it is like physics based so like A goat will run into a barrel and move it one space to the left into a burning oil slick that will blow that up and suddenly...

the shockwave of that will launch you into the cactus and then you die like a cartoon character. That sounds like stuff that happens like without any foresight in Baldur's Gate 3. It's like, oh God, a goblin through a barrel. It's kind of like imagine building a roguelike around that experience and you just... need to sit there and stare at the grid long enough to kind of like see the matrix and figure out like

what will actually happen here? What will actually keep me safe if I take literally... If instead of shooting anyone, I take one step backwards while all these enemies accidentally kill themselves instead, like maybe that's the answer here. And the amount of times that kind of simple solution ends up being true is what makes Gunshow, I think, such a powerful piece of game design in my eyes.

On top of that, there is a daily challenge. And the daily challenge comes with just different... weird modifiers so sometimes it'll be like there are no walls or sometimes it'll be like every oil slick is already on fire or sometimes it'll be like we've already given you three abilities and three gun upgrades and you're not allowed to choose anymore you're just stuck with these

see where you land on the leaderboard. Um, and I play it still almost every day. Uh, and I love it to death. Gun show rock.

It's available on Android, iOS, and I think also on Steam. And I super, super recommend playing it. And I think... at least based on talking to other people who have taken that recommendation and have played it give it enough time to kind of get over and i know this is not gonna be possible for everybody um but give it enough time to get over that hump of like this is just random there's no actual strategy here because once you once you kind of get past that hump i think the the

like spelunky level of no this is all knowable and you've seen you've seen enough interactions between things to know what to avoid i think is really powerful you gave me a similar advice with spelunky where like just get give it like an hour because you're just going to be like

like dead immediately yeah yeah until you see the language i think that's i think that's one of the things about spelunky that is so powerful as well as just like it does feel completely impossible until suddenly you've died on enough spikes or you've like tried to steal the thing before the... giant Indiana Jones ball falls on your head enough times that you're like okay I know what to do I know what not to do and I know kind of how to toe the line on like

Like, you know, almost breaking the rules at times. And the ability to do that in gun show, I think, speaks to how intricately designed it is. And I think keeping it affixed to a grid also in a world where so many roguelikes that I think that are popping off these days are like card based or platforming based like Spelunky or like combat based like...

Hades having something that is very much just like, this is a really classic turn-based difficult strategy roguelike is really really exciting and I love it oh there's also a Pico 8 version which is great and I think free And I got it for both of you. Thank you so much. You'll have that on your handhelds. you had texted me about gun show early one one morning yeah you said you should download this game you'd like it yeah it just so happened to be the day that i was going with my uh parents

to wait for my dad's hip surgery. Oh, so I had plenty of time to sit in a waiting room and play a gun show. So I, I played gun show, I think for like two solid hours that day. Um, just, you know, over the course of waiting and like going to get food and stuff. Um, it's a great time. It's so much fun. Yeah. I'm like with, with roguelikes. I, I don't get that sense of like.

i have to overcome this like i have to beat it i whatever like i just love seeing how far i can get in a run and then once the run's over i'm like ah nice I'm not like I have to get farther next time I'm just like well that's how far that one got yeah that's why you and I like FTL because it really is that where it's like it's almost

like it doesn't matter if you get to the final boss and actually probably gonna lose what just happened this yeah yeah yeah that's kind of where i'm at with gun show on the daily challenge specifically because they're adding so many modifiers all the time it's less of like a I really want to beat this run yeah and more of a oh this is an interesting selection here

you know that's getting randomly generated and we all have it like i'm just curious to see how far i can get and i'm almost more curious to see the leaderboards and see if anyone was able to finish it because sometimes like what they give you is so weird that it's like you know okay your bullet will ricochet off the first thing it hits And then the second upgrade is also it'll ricochet off the second thing it hits. And then the third upgrade is it ricochets off the third thing it hits.

So you're in a place where it's like, is every bullet I fire just going to kill me? Like if I shoot at one thing, will it just loop back around and kill everyone on the map? I don't know. And you never really know. Was anyone able to finish this? And I think that curiosity is kind of what keeps me.

coming back more than anything else. I'll also say I like the normal mode but there's an expert mode where when you die the run is over which is like how most roguelikes work but in the main game or like in normal mode quote unquote they give you the ability to restart that level that you're on I think twice something like that I just don't like doing that is what I've learned when a run is over and I've done as much as I can and it's like do you want to try again I'm like

No, I think my time here is done. I want new upgrades. This is the canon ending. Yes, that is the canon ending for that run. I'll also say, it's in all the trailers and stuff, but the final level of the boss is just a really... fun weird very unique challenge I don't I won't say a whole lot about like what it is or what's coming after you but it's like one specific enemy that has three health and is

exceedingly difficult to shoot with a gun and that's really it's a fun challenge when like level six is like we're gonna spawn 50 guys good luck when the end of a run is like you just got this one motherfucker good luck yeah it's awesome it's very western it is very western yeah yeah cool i gotta play it this is probably another yippee for me yes it's on the apple arcade right

no no no just i think it's free though on ios i don't remember paying for it so i just assumed yeah yeah i think i think the revives when you lose a run you can like watch ads and i think that's what the monetization is but i think everything else is just free i might be wrong about that yeah uh but I don't know. I picked this up earlier in the year, so I don't remember. It sounds great. Yeah, it's amazing. That's my number nine. Nice.

my number nine yes is sheepy a short adventure uh this is a game that takes one hour to play yeah uh i when there was a show that just covered Games of this length. This was a game that I heard about from the Into the Aether Discord, actually, the Discord channel shared by Invisible Street. There was a conversation happening.

They popped in and said, if anyone's looking for a one hour long, beautiful 2D platformer with incredible soundtrack, here is Sheepy. I loved it. Here's Sheepy. Shared the link.

and the conversation that was happening just kept going yeah i somehow saw it and added it to my wish list because i was like one hour sheep game it's free yeah uh platformer sure i'll play that and man that game is so good the platforming is incredibly satisfying it feels great are you a sheep you are a little sheep guy the soundtrack is is bonkers it's like it works so well with the world you're in you're in this like poker

post-apocalypse like cyberpunk future wow that's not what i was imagining yeah uh and it's like pixel art that's really beautiful it's like celeste adjacent in terms of the art style uh but it's like very you know it's much darker and stuff than celeste um oh i'm looking i'm looking at pictures of it yeah this is fascinating um but like one of the first things that happens

in no literally the first thing that happens is you wake up as sheepy and there's a piano like you're in like a pile of junk and there's a piano in that pile of junk and you can you only have one jump at the beginning of this game and it's like you know it's a pretty small jump so you can't jump fully over the piano So you jump and you land in the piano and you play, you play a couple of notes that you land on and there's like six or seven notes.

that you can jump on in that piano that'll play that are always in key with the like kind of ambient track that's playing in the very in the very first area and so it's just like really beautiful just like an awesome start to the game and there were moments you know the game is literally only one hour long but there were moments where i was like yelling at my tv like fist pumping like laughing out loud like it's it's

a fun experience and because it's an hour it crams all these great ideas into this experience and it is just like a joy to play um and that's that's kind of really all all i could say about it i think because it's it's like it's only it's on steam okay It's free. It's free. Yeah, I just added to my library. It's free to download. I think it's like 200 megabytes or something. And yeah, it's just a great time. It's a great little experience.

you know there's some light puzzle solving stuff there's definitely some easter egg stuff there's like classic metroidvania like hidden hallway stuff like you just walk into a wall and then you know that wall has a room behind it um but it just feels really great there is like a slow a ramp up of the kind of mobility that you have throughout the game and it feels great is all I can really say about it it's just mechanically it's so tight the music accompanies the game so well and

Yeah, the one, the antagonist of the game is a bear named Patches. Sold. He just looks like a stuffed bear with just a knife poking out of his head.

head i don't know great that's uh so that's cheapy a short adventure um just it's great you should check it out yeah got cheapy completely sold the sounds awesome yeah it's it's so good it's so much fun yeah it's downloading on my pc at home That's my favorite thing about doing this show is Brendan's like, I already bought it, but tell me more about it.

tell you more about cheapy i did i did make a specific list uh this year that's just called games aj brought to the show that's just things that i need to play yeah it's great to learn more games in this episode Awesome. Okay, well, we're on number eight, right? We are on number eight. No, we're on number one. We're on number one. Yeah, yeah. Time flies. You've been asleep all day. What day is it? She'd be real. Number eight for me is 1000 times resist.

a big one for the TWG community and for you I know AJ we brought this to the show a while ago you and me Brendan and we had like a spoiler free like kind of first impressions with it both like really into it really intrigued by it and then I had mentioned in passing that I had finished it a couple months ago and we haven't really talked about it since so I'm really curious where you are with it but I finished it it's incredible I mean

you know uh there there's a whole dot zip episode about this game our friend matt horton has a great video essay about this game also with interviews with the developers which is awesome and i think narratively it's

It's definitely the best experience I've had with the game in a long time. What I've already said about this game, I'll repeat here, but it's really amazing to see a work of sci-fi that is simultaneously... so personal and also kind of covers like a galactic level story yeah you know i to to give a little bit about what it is like it is a sci-fi story where there is this

um pandemic where this one girl is immune and so basically to preserve society there ends up becoming clones of her and then there's this sort of like the giver-esque yorha-esque society where like it's all just clones of this girl named iris but a handful of the clones are given like

specific jobs like fixer knower watcher and we play as watcher yeah who i've mentioned the givers because it's like you get to experience the emotional burden of history everyone else just has a job right and so the first half of the game is basically you as watcher navigating this place

talking to all the sisters and receiving what's called communion where you relive memories of the all mother iris And then the second half of the game, I think is a spoiler to even say, but there is basically like a very definitive act two of 1000 times resist. And I think the story with Iris, I think enough time has passed that we're starting to see a lot of like, you know, I think consciously or not reality informs the stories we tell. And I think we're starting to see like.

COVID kind of seep into a lot of stories. I don't think this story needs to be about COVID to work. But I do think the experience of living in lockdown and in quarantine definitely informs like the society. And at least that's what we can kind of currently reflect on this story where there are like.

clones of people who are not immune to this disease there's also a little bit of like adam and eve we're like yeah you know there's immortality from one generation that's denied to another that's what i mean by being personal but also being universal where like yes you can apply this kind of story beat to now but i think it also purposely applies to a lot of other periods in history

And we even get that in the text of the game. I also just think the story of like identity with Iris and, you know, being this, asian teenager in a largely white society and you know the the conflicting feelings with that coupled with like literally being a clone of the same person and how you like struggling with how unique

one can be when you are literally a clone but also the conversation of how unique are we from our parents all of that is fascinating I mean you could take any five minute part of this game and probably write several different theses about it you know like these psi theses uh yeah so i think like narratively it's fantastic and i also think kind of being a work of art from a group of people that are making their first game that's i think the best and arguably worst thing about this game is that

you have a group of people with like backgrounds in dance and theater working on a game for the first time and that so informs like the direction of this game and makes it so unique and so cool i will say the reason this isn't like an easy top five for me is like i kind of resented playing it for a while like i just struggled so much with like the feeling of movement the sort of like zipline platforming sequences and like anytime i was told to explore i just got so lost which is like

such a dumb thing to complain about given like what this game is tackling and like how successful it is in every other avenue but that being said when i think about like i'm i'm a big fan of narrative driven games and visual novels

and when I think about the games that kind of work best for me the mechanics kind of fully intertwine with the narrative and I guess for me very subjectively this game would have worked better if it was I guess a kinetic novel or if I had even less control I do really like

what i will say is there's a final choice to be made that was brilliant and i really love the beginning chapter where you're like flipping back and forth between periods of time that's kind of all i needed i think when the game feels pressure to maybe add more gameplay That's where I feel like the moment is actually being diffused by my like. either enjoyment of the mechanics or just sort of my inability to track where I am but ultimately that doesn't affect the story and like

For a game that I maybe struggled with mechanically, I will never stop thinking about it. And I think it's just a profound work of art. So it's definitely a game worth your time if you haven't played it. I would suggest going in. completely blind and if you uh inevitably need to discuss it with some friends there's plenty of episodes about this game in our discord and also a really active uh channel for it as what i've been told so um that's

That's kind of my spoiler-free read on it. I would love to talk about this game kind of more in depth one day with you, Brendan, if you wanted to. But yeah, for my current time with it, it's number eight, but it's... i really want to stress how much i love the story of this game and how much i respect the developers behind it yeah i will say i didn't finish it which uh is a big regret but also

At a certain point, I realized that I was playing it more out of obligation than out of desire, I would say. And given how limited my time has been for the past like two... I was like, I would much rather have like a kind of wide berth to be able to experience this the way it's meant to be experienced. It still made my honorable mentions list based on what I have played. I made it into that very spoilery act two.

so like I know like I know it's up and I am enjoying it as much as you can enjoy a story that's that heavy you know I think I think it's doing all the right things But I didn't get to see it through, which is a bummer. I didn't bring this up during the Yippies segment because I knew it would come up eventually. But yeah, I think it's...

It's brilliant. I think it's like a masterpiece. And I just am kind of anticipating it kind of hovering in the same space for me as Death Stranding did the year that came out where it's like. I didn't have that in my top 10, but that probably would have been maybe even my number one game of the year had I finished it in time. I think similarly, I think A Thousand Times Resist probably would have hovered in that top five area. Yeah, for sure. It's a great game. So that's my number eight.

it yeah it it may come up later but uh i will say uh all right tuesday the cat has to do yes also uh i i i will say i echo a lot of what the two of you are saying about the narrative and stuff yeah of course um and uh i think the use of it it kind of does a near automata style thing where like you're there are a couple different like styles of game being presented to you throughout certain communions

That worked for me, and I liked it. Every time it happened, there was one... chapter that started in a different style than i had been playing in and i had to put the game down because i was like i cannot believe this is what we're doing now yeah um and but But yeah, it'll come up more later. I just wanted to say something. I think the gameplay, I don't want to sound too harsh because I loved it, obviously. But the gameplay worked significantly more for me in the first half.

i think it was really the second half of the game where i started to bump up against the sense of direction more because they're like i mentioned there's a moment where like the whole screen is blurry and you have to walk home and i was like i don't know where home is and now it's blurry and now i'm like more frustrated than I am enjoying this story being and that might just be my experience but like I think like there is a sequence near the end where it is a timed

find your way out and i was i felt personally insulted this is my biggest weakness in this game how is this how it's ending yeah uh but again it's like i don't want that to be like the the the overwhelming take on it because it's a beautiful story and i do think it like pays off to be a game i definitely want to see what this team works on next though because i think this experience

miraculous this is their first game yeah uh i really want to see what they make now with like one game under their belts yeah um yeah i'm dying to play more of whatever they have going on um Yeah. Any game that pulls this much from Evangelion, I'm like, I'm there.

What's going on, Aether? This is Matt Horton from Can't Let It Go and Flowstate. And honestly, I hate that I'm being forced to choose my game of the year right now because 2024 has been a wild year for video games. But I guess we got to choose one. So I'd love to come on here and tell you that Ballotro was my game of the year for the second year in a row. But this is also the year that I played Persona 3 Reload and fell head over heels for that entire franchise.

It's also the year that 1000 Times Resist came out, the debut game from Sunset Visitor, and I think fundamentally shook up what I believe video games can do. Um, and frankly tore the discord apart. I, if I have to pick one, I think it has to be 1000 times resist, but. That is only my answer today.

I have loved playing video games in 2024, and I've loved listening to this show in 2024, just like I've loved listening to it for so many years past. Thank you so much for making it, and Happy New Year, everyone. Wow. Okay. Number eight for me is a game for the PlayStation 5 called Astro Bot.

you're a little yeah it's astrobot it's like you're a little robot and you run around in space interesting riddle me this can he run on top of a ps1 uh yeah okay at times sold yeah how many playstations have there been five i'll stop with the bit yeah it did take me a second i was like how many have there been um there have been some spinoffs yeah

Yeah. Anyway, Astro Bot. sorry is um a it's an adventure platform it's a very classic adventure platformer um honestly in the vein of a lot of playstation 1 s games and specifically I think hearkening back to like the move to 3D as a lot of platformers moved from 2D to 3D Astro Bot is kind of squarely in that realm of video game mechanically but pulls off as many many many people have said myself included what Mario is able to do in that every moment every level

is filled with so many ideas that are only briefly touched upon and then moved on from. I think one of the things that Astro Bot is like kind of cemented in my head as doing now is almost.

being aware that so many people talk about that being mario's magic trick now that they then go back to the well So you'll have frog hands for a bit and be like, wow, I love having frog hands where when I punch with, you know, the punch button, I have these like kind of... nintendo switch game uh arms like springs shout out that shoot out and i can punch stuff with my frog hands um i think arms is nintendo's got yippy i just want to say

And then they move on to the next level and you're like, wow, it was so cool having frog hands. What a fun time that was. I can't wait to see what's next.

And then, you know, two hours later in the game, you have frog hands again. Yeah. Which is the thing that Mario doesn't frequently do. And when you get frog hands again, you're like, oh my God, I'm so excited to have frog hands again. And not only that, but like they've come up with a completely new way of using that mechanic. Yeah, they're really clever about multiple.

You think it would just be for destroying things with boxing gloves, but having to get... stuck in like ink and then it can suddenly be like a grappling hook as you're swinging with it yeah it's so clever the way they keep reinventing those ideas i think is spectacular i think the reason this is much lower on my list you know even though it's still in the top 10 and a very hard year to make it into the top 10 but

the reason it's lower on my top 10 than it would have been I think is because there is kind of a cognitive dissonance happening in my brain when I'm playing it which is a thing you and I have talked about a lot and we talked about a lot in the episode where it came out where it's like this is an homage to a lot of studios that

Sony has decided to close because they thought they weren't profitable or worthwhile intellectual property. And when you build an entire game around the idea of marketing your own intellectual property to be like... The things that these people made are worthwhile, but the people who made them are not feels... really difficult to kind of like grapple with while playing it and it sands off

some of the joy of what Asobi Studios was trying to do here. I think that they have pulled off something miraculous in making what is essentially like a big piece of marketing that does feel like it stands toe to toe with a Mario game in a lot of ways.

The fact that I'm walking away from it, feeling more positive than anything else. And I think in a lot of ways, like asking for more, like I'm dying for more Astro Bot. I think that's exhilarating. I think having... another franchise that's on this level that is serving this audience which is like pretty much the whole spectrum from the youngest people playing video games to the people who are the most nostalgic about that era I think that it's

astonishing to have accomplished that. And I'm glad that they were given that shot. I think Astro Bot is a really exceptional video game. And I'm excited that they just added some new holiday-themed stuff this week, which I haven't played yet. Yeah, I can't wait.

i i definitely hear you like i i think um obviously it's not team asobi's fault like that the things are and i know it's sony's fault i think what kind of prevents me from feeling like i definitely share that feeling like uh this is like

It's meant to be Disney World, but it's actually a graveyard. Some levels are actually graveyards of ghosts. It's got some Bloodborne stuff in it. I think... i appreciate that this team and if i'm not mistaken i think there is some crossover with people that left japan studio with team sobe so like if anyone has the right to kind of celebrate these forgotten

games it's them yeah but yeah i'm not putting any of that on asobi to be clear no no no i just think it's i just think it's worth stating like it's it's definitely like a sony issue and i i simultaneously recognize that like it feels a little gross to be like ah look at this mascot who's not named from a game that's not legally purchasable right but also it's like

I like that someone is acknowledging that game because Sony wouldn't be you know that's what I mean about the cognitive dissonance is like

like it's Glup Shido in Star Wars moment. You know, it's like seeing Kat from Gravity Rush show up, you know, or seeing like Boku from Boku no Natsuyasumi show up and being like, oh my God, what a wild thing. But then also knowing like, you know there's not going to be another gravity rush anytime soon yeah it's like oh what a bummer man yeah i totally agree with you there yeah it's like both both

exist as like brief flashes in my head but again at the end of the day like the thing I'm walking away from is like wow Astro Bot was amazing what an amazing video game it is and like what a joy it was to make my way through that and like almost 100% it and I'm

i probably will at some point like i'll probably dive back in i'll have i'll have the urge to jump back into astrobot and just like get everything eventually um the dark urge i'll follow the dark urge eventually um but yeah astrobot's my number eight i think i think it's an amazing game Love it a lot. And it's the Game Awards winner. It's the Game Awards Goaty. For another acronym. It's like a Goaty. Yeah.

yeah yeah uh we all draw the lines somewhere differently i can hear your brain like all right does this suck no i was just trying to work i was like what does this look like It's the game. So I'll start with this. If Arctic Eggs was a game that I liked because of the story and the theme and Sheepy was a game that I liked because of the mechanic.

this is a game that i liked because of both of them that's the that's the through line for my list and now all the games i like the mechanics and the story wow um this is home safety hotline oh yeah this is a game that came out like january

14th of this year last year i also thought it was last year that i was looking and i went oh god it's been a long year yeah um i played this game uh and talked about it on video game pottymism uh at the very beginning this year so if you can listen to that if you want yeah but so much fun it is it is uh uh i think the besties coined these types of games ui rpgs yes um where you are a good acronym yeah you're you're role-playing

in a user interface environment. And in this case, it is like a, you know, 90s, early 2000s style PC. And you just got a new office job. at the home safety hotline. So mechanically, this game is you're receiving calls throughout your workday that are like,

hey, this thing is happening. I'm not really sure what to do about it. And you, as the representative for the home safety hotline, are either to tell them, I can't help you, sorry, or go through this database that you have of basically folkloric...

creatures that have like specific entries on them and like you can there's like visual representations of them as well and to like cross reference that with the things that the person on the phone has just told you about their problem and like they're they're like you know two sentence call like stays at the top of the screen so you can it's very easy to cross reference this stuff with the entries

and as the game goes on you know obviously they add more entries to the thing and you know more more kind of weird stuff starts happening but the real horror in this game because this is I guess worth noting kind of a Styled as a horror game But the real horror of this game is capitalism There it is, the office job Is capitalism, how is it bad? Wouldn't that be the good guy? No. Well, so see, there's this thing where exploitation of the worker and their time and energy.

uh no is that one of the things like oh actually your issue is capitalism yeah it's in the it's in the list i thought it was mothman um no but Every day starts off with a call. every day mothman's hedge fund actually is the problem mothman's not the problem i hate when we come up with really good episode titles for episodes we can't name yeah we should just name go to 24 mothman's hedge fund

um but every day starts off with a call from your supervisor that's like hey your performance yesterday was really good or like it was really whatever like if you keep if you keep it up you'll be able you'll be moving on up in the company in no time and so that happens throughout the i think it's

And you're also getting emails. And so you get a couple of marketing emails. You get a couple of emails that are just like random. And then you also get emails from a mysterious person who's like, hey, you're not safe.

you should stop working this job as soon as possible uh and so that's the thing that just goes that goes throughout the whole game and in the end the the i'm not spoiling it i'm just you know yeah talking about at the after i finish this game like the perspective that it has on like

how workplaces exploit workers and like what does like quote moving up in a company even really mean for a person like is that a good thing to like work toward all this stuff is so so so great to think about uh i love to think um and it's it's wrapped up in this like supremely stylish little package yeah um like the the the vibes are are so incredibly tuned and the creature designs are unreal. After you beat the game, you get access to, on your desktop, you get access to an art book.

which is like a 23 or like 30 something page like basically art book slash commentary of the whole game like the development of the game and it and it's it's this husband and wife team who met doing puppeteering and and like costumed like customer service interaction at this now defunct god i don't even know how to describe it like fairy tale theme park or whatever renaissance fair kind of like a renaissance fair but it was like this is the place where this

Like fair is like this is like I'm if you're going to six flags or something. It's like, oh, I'm going to a fairy tale Yeah, like I'm going to fairytale park this weekend or whatever like And so like they had the the the guy had done puppeteering and design and stuff. And so like he walks you through even like the prototypes to the prototype for this game of like.

Here's what I thought I wanted it to be at first. I kind of toyed around with the telemarketing kind of thing. I had another game where you're kind of inventing potions and stuff or creatures or whatever. And then this is kind of the culmination. So it's just really cool that that was built into the game. It's a thing you can go to basically immediately as soon as you finish.

your first playthrough of the game, shortly after I... finished the game and we talked about it on potomism they introduced basically an endless mode um where it's kind of just like a score chase like see how far you can get what's like the lost state like how do you lose yeah you lose I don't know, honestly, for like the main story. I'm not. It's not like.

super hard and i did at some points feel like i was doing bad yeah and i just just kept moving you on in the story i'm not fully like what is doing good even like what do you yeah so you get like you know

six or seven calls in a in a work day okay and each one that you successfully diagnose is like a success oh and so then when your supervisor calls you the next day he's like hey you did really great with those like five but there was like one that you missed and so like yeah just just mothman got me again yeah but that's the thing is like there were days where I felt like I was like wow I missed like three or four of these and it didn't seem to affect

the gameplay. I do think there is a fail state, but I'm not 100% sure what it looks like. Got it. Maybe if you just perform badly enough. Just really, really bad the whole time. Yeah, I don't know. But it is interesting. You can almost You can sometimes immediately tell the effects.

like whether you did it successfully or not based on the response the person gives you. Oh, that's cool. Or they'll like follow up like the next day. And there was one that I did fuck up on the second day or something. And then the third day, the. the woman who had called called back and was like,

sobbing, like weeping into the phone and like screaming and then just hung up. And it was like, it was harrowing yeah it was in it was wild the voice acting this game is really good but it's it's it ah man yes thank you for bringing that up i totally

I was just curious. This is reminding me of my customer service days at Groupon. It doesn't gamify it really at all. You don't get a score at the end of the day or you don't get stars or anything. It's just like you're super supervisor calls you and is like nice you did pretty good yesterday keep it up nice um yeah nice

Yeah, so it's just like the care and thought put into this game is like evident from moment one. And it is just like so fun to experience this short story. I think it's like three hours. I actually think I streamed it. That's how I know. Yeah. Okay. I don't know if that bod is maybe a dream I had last year, but it was like real.

thing i had this year this year yeah but yeah it's a it's a great experience and and i highly recommend you check it out there's dlc that they released i think last month it's like a holiday themed or something oh was it santa yeah so i think there's like but it's like there aren't the creature designs are all original or like spins on what you think you know so I think there are like kobolds

technically but like they're not what you think of as like even folkloric kobolds or the dnd kobolds like they're their own kind of thing yeah it's very cool and and he also walks through in the art book like how he did the portraits for these things because, like I said, there are portraits of these creatures in the database.

And a lot of it is like, I took this picture of like a figurine I have kind of peeking out from behind my couch and then I fucked it up. I fucked it up real crazy in Photoshop. And so just like that process stuff was very, very cool.

So it's just, it's like, it's a, it's a very good game. Uh, and you should check it out. And it is my number eight video game of 2020. Number eight. Oh, what was it called again? Home safety hotline. I almost said Hollywood hotline. That's definitely not a very different video game. Yes. Different video game for sure. Yeah. Steven, what's your seven? It was Tim Allen. He ruined my apartment. Ask the Santa Claus. That's the holiday.

became Santa. I took this figurine that was peeking out behind the couch and I just made it look like Tim Allen. I just put it in Photoshop and fucked it up real good and it came out looking just like Tim Allen. Number seven. Number seven. Number seven for me is Tekken 8. Hell yeah. As evidenced by my King shirt I'm wearing. Yeah, shout out. That's a great shirt. Thank you. I like it a lot. Tekken 8, I have like...

this is the most Tekken-ass game ever. It's just, the thing about it, like going into Tekken 8, I think a lot of people were kind of using Street Fighter 6 as a point of comparison where it's like, those are probably the two biggest fighting game series right now. The biggest ones that have been running the longest.

i think street fighter 6 really made a visible effort to onboard new players like that was i think one of the coolest things about that game is that seeing in the discord so many people who had been intimidated by fighting games in general not even just street fighter be like oh this character looks cool i want to play as them um and having like a really supportive group in our discord which was really cool but even the game itself feels like

a supportive environment like if you're doing the like um tutorials about a certain character they're narrated by that character oh cool so like it'll be like yeah this is how i beat up ken you know uh which i love um tekken 8 has a little bit of that but it does There is like an arcade mode where you make like a weird Tekken me and they go to like arcades around the world. And it's hilarious.

and that actually was pretty helpful and just like learning like because I've played a lot of Tekken growing up but I couldn't tell you like I know I don't know like the meta of Tekken I don't know like there are certain there's terminology about Street Fighter I can kind of infer or know kind of directly with Tekken it feels like another language and also like

It's interesting to reflect on the era of 3D Fighter. When we were doing the Dreamcast episode, 3D fighting games were pitched as the future. Soul Calibur 1 was a system seller, and games that weren't 3D fighters weren't performing as well.

and now we've kind of moved like if you're a 3d fighter you're kind of at a disadvantage because chances are it's like a ip thing like a naruto game or a dbz game right sell really well caliber now yeah uh like they sell really well but they're kind of more of a novelty whereas like we've sort of established like okay 2d fighting games you can make an esport out of you can have this a community around but tekken you know again king of the iron fist

still around still a huge esport and the the possibilities are endless yeah which is super intimidating so I think with Tekken 8 I didn't find the same community around it that i did with street fighter that being said like you were mentioning with sheepy you were like fist pumping the whole time every fight in tekken feels like the best wrestling match you've ever watched like they make every they call it the sheepy of fighting games it just

i just and especially playing as king who obviously is my main evidence by my shirt uh he's a literal wrestler so so many of his moves are like grabbing someone mid one of their moves and making it one of his moves and like pulling that off is thrilling and the music is great i think the look of it is really cool too there's also so many customization options with like you know you can give them like different outfits and stuff like so my king has leon's resident evil 4 jacket and sunglasses

hell yeah fantastic it's this is definitely one i would like to go back to and maybe try to learn a little bit more i do think there's there's a community around in the discord but i even i felt very intimidated where i just like didn't fully know what i was doing but it is i just

felt the need to put on my list because it's definitely one of the best fighting games i've ever played and probably the best tekken honestly wow uh just mechanically speaking so yeah tekken 8 is my number seven chat out yeah tekken 8 i didn't i didn't play it yeah i think i'd like to though I think you would enjoy. I mean, you are just.

kind of approaching the fighting game worlds yeah going to Tekken 8 is a little bit like taking someone who's never been on roller coasters onto Nitro yeah in Six Flags you know which I actually weirdly was my introduction to roller coasters but

I digress. Did you see their closing Kingdaka? Yeah. Oh, really? Yeah. Is it the one that like... kind of almost goes to space basically like you're in space for like a little bit i mean basically yeah yeah there's a uh guilty gear character speaking of fighting games potemkin whose special move is grabbing the character putting them on his shoulders and he goes so high to do a pile driver that you briefly see like gods and then goes crashing back down it's

so fun. It's amazing. That's what riding King Takah was like. Rest in peace King Takah. We saw like, is that Zeus? Number seven. This is fun. This is a fun one. This is our first Fantasio. My number seven is Metaphor. Wow. Free Fantasio. I mean we'll talk about it a lot later but why that's presumptuous of you Tuesday loved it

It's definitely going to be higher up on her list. No, metaphor, I mean, basically is exactly what we all wanted it to be, I think, is maybe the way to lead into this. You know, it's the team that... put together Personas 3, 4, and 5 and a bunch of other people who have made other great games that we all love also

forming a kind of little mini super group and saying like we're going to make atlas's final fantasy it kind of feels like almost like a chrono trigger scenario it does yeah exactly dream team i i think

I think it's interesting to look at the oeuvre of Atlas in a lot of ways and just think about the fact that they've never really stepped their toe in this arena despite obviously being inspired by it in a lot of ways you know obviously SMT has existed alongside Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest pretty much the entire time but it's interesting that they've never just fully said like we are going to make a fantasy first experience like this uh and metaphor as their take on it feels

in that it's exactly how atlas would and should pull this off it's still them it's not them like conforming it's them kind of modifying fantasy to their view yeah and there are a lot of interviews with the development team talking about how much advice they got from other people who have created great fantasy world saying like early on in the process, you're adhering too much to inspiration from Tolkien or you're inspired too much by what Final Fantasy already is.

like you need to deviate even more. And what they've landed on, I think, is a really, really fascinating and spectacular version of a fantasy setting that does feel wholly unique to Atlas.

i mean again we'll talk about it a lot later but like mechanically great characters great uh thematically i think i was a little bit iffy early on and then later and you get the more you're like oh no they're gonna stick the landing here um i haven't finished it i'm excited to it's another one how far did you get i'm just curious

uh after well i don't want to say who the character is but you and i've talked about the dungeon under the castle i finished that okay so the second dungeon second main dungeon yeah or is that the third i don't know whatever uh but anyway I loved every minute of what I played of it I thought it was I thought it was amazing and it really just continued to unfurl and become better and better and better over time it's just like I could just sit there and like

whatever the positive version of nitpicking is about every single little like choice they made from like how being from like if you're being yippy picking yippy picking from like how fast travel is introduced as an idea to the ways in which they decide to map the different things that are persona staples into a fantasy setting like this.

you know like reading a book on the windowsill of your uh your machine that sprints across deserts and that's your version of an airship like stuff like that yeah they're able to really make the i think this sort of slice of life emotionally grounded moments persona feel right at home even in this world that is so unlike ours yeah like reading a book in the gauntlet runner feels like studying in your cafe home in persona totally yeah i think

I do have my, going back to nitpicks, my like my one little asterisk on metaphor that I kind of like still hold is you gave this team free reign and they made a persona, but it's fantasy. like there's still a version of me that's like i i want them to like break outside of those boundaries and do something even better in a lot of ways and bigger but i mean that is the that is the niddiest of picks possible because what they made i think is still one of the best atlas games

probably of all time specifically the mechanics of it the battle system I found to be more and more unique as you get further totally I agree with you yeah yeah so but I know you mean it's like structurally it's it feels very much like what from soft does we're like right there is always like there's always going to be a bonfire and an estes flask and you know all these things

they're just going to give them different names right this time it's an archetype instead of a persona but i think this this game's mission in a lot of ways was like proving that this formula worked outside of the exact scenario we've seen it in for almost 20 years. Yeah. And I think if nothing else, they succeeded on that. Right. They made another pillar. Right. Exactly.

hard to do we were watching a lot of companies fail at that i think starfield is unfortunately like a great example of like what should have been a third pillar for bethesda that like didn't work out and here's atlas being like we have smt we have persona and now we have metaphor yeah never on

will follow this like i i don't want to get too into what a sequel could be because that would be spoiler territory but i guess my question is like will it be this world every time which they could totally do it's a rich enough world that I think it opens possibilities for sequels or is it going to be like Final Fantasy where like

metaphor is like there might be familiar elements but it's a different world each time maybe a different genre each time yeah i was gonna say like maybe we get into sci-fi yeah i'm i would be into both i would lean towards the former because i'm currently very emotionally attached to like

this crew i would like my my vote if i can if anyone's listening hi steven uh my vote would be this world but in a different time period like jump ahead maybe like a hundred years or something yeah consider atlas xenogears i mean when am i not okay uh that's exactly exactly right yeah yeah um but i i think it's also interesting too just to see what ideas they're concerned with like

I always bring up Supergiant as an example of a team that's largely been a lot of the same people over a long period of time and seeing this cyclical storytelling and all their games take a variety of forms.

I think it's cool to see this team at Atlas just like... try to tell a story and try to build a game around certain ideas you know kind of i mean a lot of them are really literally about the power of friendship um and it's cool to see that actually meaningfully explored in different ways yeah i think that's that's

to do it's interesting because it's almost like it's almost like a bell curve of like when you're early on in a journey in terms of like trying to become a storyteller you will go to that well you'll be like this is a love story this is a story about friendship this is a story about like bad people good versus evil and then you kind of get like to the top of the bell curve and it's like I'm talking about more complex

more horrifying themes but then on the other end of that bell curve like once you have become incredible at storytelling is like can you succinctly find a way to make a game about the power of friendship with with all these with all of these other things you know and and if if the person walking away from that experience is like wow that was a really moving experience and I have a better understanding of love as an emotion because of it then like that's

yeah and i think atlas has done that multiple times yeah that's all i'll say for now because uh first of all this is your segment and uh i have more to say about but i'm gonna hold back right yeah but i'm really glad it worked for you Yeah, I did. I'm going to finish it. I'm excited to do that. It's going to be great. Yeah, once I have more time, I'm so excited to go back to Metaphor. Yeah. That's number seven. Seven.

Greetings, dear listener. This is Numan, aka NBZ, from PlayStack and the This Nintendo Life podcast. I was honored over the summer to be invited on to X-Strike Summer for Into the Aether and honored once again to be back to tell you about my favorite video game of the year 2024. A year where really, frankly, we all needed a lot of video games to help us get through it.

And none more so for me than my pick for number one, which is Metaphor Re-Fantasio, a game that had me hooked from its very first moments, from its initial cutscene. I was in from the astonishing art design and the way that these enemies are drawn and crafted to the heart-wrenching tales of these characters, the world they inhabit.

and the relationship between them there is not a weak character in this cast it is filled with tremendous twists and turns and just takes you on a roller coaster ride the whole way through uh it captivated me for 90 hours in the space of three weeks uh and did not let go and that's not even to mention the music the soundtrack from Shoji Meguro that is that chanting will just live rent free in my head

for I think the rest of my life. It is astonishing work, otherworldly, unlike anything I've ever heard before. And yeah, incredible, incredible to hear. But most of all, in a year where we all needed escape. It speaks to the importance of fiction, of fantasy specifically, and the power that that can have over us and our lives and how it inspires us to move forward and take on the world.

So truly appreciate it. I do have to, however, give another shout out to another game that nobody is talking about. That is one of my favorites of the year. My number two, in fact, Mini Shoot Adventures. An astonishing, incredible game that... blends Zelda with shoot-'em-ups and has some of the best juice, some of the best game feel in anything I've laid my hands on this year. Phenomenal.

brilliant little game and i hope more people get to play it and try it out anyway that's it from me have a wonderful new year bye My number seven. Seven. Seven. Seven. Is... mouthwash oh yeah okay right letter yeah uh yeah mouthwashing uh by a wrong organ uh creator of the aforementioned how fish is made yeah yeah Man, mouthwashing is a game that starts off in space. you get kind of a captain's log of like your work or like it's this this freighting company pony express

The ship is called the Tolpar. The whole journey is supposed to take 382 days. Currently, we're on day 196. And that's all just like on the screen. There's just space happening. And then really slowly at the bottom, a phrase fades in, just says, I hope this hurts. Oh, that's how the game begins.

um and then and then the game actually begins uh and we are hopping back and forth in time uh it is a first person perspective we are hopping back and forth in time pre and post asteroid crash And it is just a harrowing story about these people, these five, one, two, three, four. Five. Yes, five. These five people, the crew of the Tolpar, shipping something through space.

And I really, I think I don't want to really say too, too much about the specific story stuff of this game because it only takes an hour and a half about to play. But it is just like... it is one of those games that makes you feel empty at the end um just like mentally emotionally physically yeah

uh just like exhausting in every single way um and it's definitely not a game for everybody uh but if you like that kind of like stories that make you feel like that then I would definitely suggest that you check it out because it really has a lot to say about like

systems and inaction being as damning as action uh man and what else i i just like that that's that's really i think all i really want to get into it in in in in general especially because it's one of your yippies steven i don't i don't i don't want to get too too specific will i say yippie no um But that can be a very powerful form of catharsis. I mean, the opposite of the friendship. Yes.

the magic of friendship like i think if your story has something really powerful to say like having kind of you know for lack of a better phrase like a bad ending can also be very powerful yeah yeah and definitely

from what I've heard, I've watched a lot of video essays on this because I wanted to put them in the show notes for the podcast because we did talk about it on .zip. So if you want to hear that conversation, that exists. But I watched like... eight or so video essays on this game and all kind of tackling

slightly different ideas throughout the entire game in really interesting ways, I think. But there's just a lot to talk about with this game. And I think it is a game that you... should only play if you a like video essays or b have other people who will talk to you about it afterwards yeah because i don't think it does it would do you any good to play this game and then just feel bad to like go to work and just have to like live with that yeah um because i i like

our conversation on dot zip like me and it was a just a me and chase episode kim was unable to make it but just having the ability to like bounce ideas off of each other there's also a really great girl mode episode where they basically spend the whole episode talking about the story of that game as well

And it's just it's it's a game that that really benefits, I think, from thinking about and talking about it with somebody else. I definitely think it's not a game that you should sit with on your own. Yeah, I find that a lot with like theater specifically. Like, I don't know if you two find this way, but like, I feel like when I. see a like drama performed live it affects me emotionally way more intensely uh

for you know for better and for worse like i think you know musicals can spark immense joy and a really heavy play can feel like you lived it too yeah yeah and having that kind of moment i mean i think all art should be discussed afterwards but like um having that kind of

session of like making sense of it and talking about and sharing it it is kind of part of the experience so i totally hear what you're saying yeah having not played it but i get what you're saying yeah yeah but it definitely is that that type of experience um do you think i would like it

insofar as you can like a game that leaves you feeling empty at the end honestly i don't know how you feel about those types of experiences if i'm being totally honest my first instinct was no but really just because i don't feel like i've heard you express interest in

stuff like i guess the closest would be like when the three of us talked about last of us part two yeah i was glad that we had that because that was a game too like by the time i reached the ending of that i just felt like sick yeah you know so it was helpful to have to kind of talk through it together was really helpful. But I also feel like Last of Us 2 is a game that... That I enjoy, to be clear, but it's very harrowing. Yeah, definitely. But I also think the game itself tries to...

give the player at least a little bit of catharsis and like completion to the story whereas mouth washing ends on a note that is like just upsetting not to dwell on this too much but like I think it's interesting thinking about video game endings specifically because unlike other mediums like

A game does maybe have a bit more pressure to make you feel like you won. Even if it's not a win or loss game, there is that kind of... subconscious design of like i beat it like when people say they finish a game they will often say i beat it even if it's like a narrative experience like that so i wonder if it's like a much braver and harder to pull off choice to like basically make that impossible yeah yeah i don't know if

i would i would use the word braver but like i definitely think you need to riskier maybe yeah like you need to be really committed to doing that you know and like if you're not if you're not going whole ass

into like trying to make the people playing this game feel bad. Like if they... tried to spin it in a way that like didn't leave you feeling totally shitty at the end of the game I feel like that would have lessened the impact I guess my question is because I think yeah and this is another thing that came up a lot with last of us part two with like you know some critics

critics i really respect calling it kind of like torture porn and do you feel like this game kind of falls into that at all like is there are there elements of it where it's because that's where i bump up against it where it's like i think if you have like

the story should take the form the story needs to accomplish its goals yeah uh but if the game is just trying to like that's why i don't play a lot of like um horror games that look kind of streamer bae where it's like just heads exploding and people screaming like

Like this obviously doesn't sound like that, but do you think that maybe that's why it's divisive? Like some people might feel like this is just unpleasant for the sake of it, you know? Yeah, I do feel like there is an element of like seeing it like that and feeling that way about it. And I think that's...

that's totally valid but i do think if you see the if you see it through and and then you take that experience and talk it through with somebody or you know watch video essays about it and stuff i think i think any i don't think there is ever a moment where it's just like doing something to make you like react right it's a reactionary thing yeah i think it all serves I think it all serves the story for better and for worse

yeah I know a lot of movies like that specifically but I was trying to think of other games that kind of end that way because you're right even Last of Us Part 2 has like a little bit of like You won. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. A little bit of a potential hopeful ending. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, so that's mouthwashing. Brendan, I think you would like it. Great. I'll play it. This may be cheating because technically 50 video games, but number six is UFO 50.

Um, it's great. I mean, this is, this is one that I'm sure I will maybe regret or rethink the placement of like, cause it is.

it does feel like someone gave you a game jam so it's hard to like kind of rank singularly yeah um but i i will echo your sentiment brendan on your wonderful video essay about this game that like it does feel like the gamification of when we do our console retrospectives we're like I do think if you're someone who... i think most people will play this game and find a handful of because for just to set up what it is ufo 50 is

50 games made for a imaginary console that came out in the 80s and it's made by a group of different developers and basically as you go through the games there they all came out like they start from i think like 1980 or maybe even the late 70s and then goes up until like the late 80s.

So you're kind of seeing this fictional console like... grow over time and also there's like a little bit of lore in about each game but even just like the way the graphics are presented and the way like the games play it does kind of mirror our own history you know with games and like

The games that came out in the 80s and 90s are obviously informing the design of these, but these games are also made actually today, so they're going to incorporate some more modern design. The stuff that is super obtuse is more intentional than perhaps it was in the 80s.

all this to say like i think most people playing this will like go through the collection play a few find the ones they like and move on which is totally valid way to play that's kind of what i ended up doing but i did make an effort to play all of them and i do think that there's sort of a meta game here where like there is enjoyment and just seeing what is in this collection yeah and when it came out and what went into the game and this sort of fictional history

And then on top of that, I think there's at least five or six games in here that I think are remarkable. And it's also fun to see a lot of this. ufo 50 is in a lot of lists that i've seen online and a lot of writers will also include like their favorite games within ufo 50 yeah and they're all wildly different which i think is really cool but party house is on everyone. Like Party House?

itself even if it was just party house that would probably be in my top 10 yeah um and i just think i will i know myself well enough to know that i will probably always go back to ufo 15 like oh man this game is great like or like some of them like the the cowboy rpg actually are final fantasy length so it's like i will need to put more time into that so i think the only reason i mean again i'm not trying to like

uh discredit being in the six to ten spots but i think the thing about all these games the reason why i've added the caveat of like Like the only reason this isn't top five is because I feel so strongly about every game here. Right. And I had to really think about nitpicks in terms of how I ordered things. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, I think like.

i i love the act of discovery within this game i love a lot of the game singularly and even the ones that i don't like i like the process of finding that out about myself um so i think this game is is a masterpiece. I've loved my time with it and I know that that time will continue which is a nice feeling. This is going to sound like a non-sequitur but it's not.

years years ago um my friend and i started a very very very short-lived music blog yeah and uh we made it you know to the end of our first year doing it decided we were going to do our album of the year and then not continue doing the blog and uh

I put at my number 10 spot, LCD Sound Systems American Dream, and my write-up for it was... I don't really like this album but I know I'm going to kick myself in five years if I don't put it here and that has been as true as humanly possible and I feel very similar about your take about like

this is a thing that like will just exist as a thing to go back to over and over and over again and every once in a while you'll probably find something new and interesting and strange about ufo 50 that you didn't catch the first time and uh i think it's it's gonna it's gonna have legs

oh yeah i mean i didn't even touch like in this conversation or even in the game the terminal control stuff right yeah you can kind of dig into these games and like manipulate them in a way yeah i'm i feel like i'm only really up on the surface i did like seeking out the games that i like the most to get like if every game has like a gold win condition and a cherry condition

So gold means basically you beat the game. Yeah. And cherry is like, you really beat the game. No, but it's like you, like you did something special on top of that. So I've been trying, I gold, uh, status. um magic garden which was really hard it's really tough um and i'm starting to go through and do that for the games like and there's also this weird like garden with a pig character and as you get like uh as you accomplish like

achievements within all the games you'll get little items for their house and garden yeah it feels a lot at least in my video i compared it to um the planet in we love katamari where all the cousins hang out it just feels like this kind of space that you're kind of tending to over

time as you continue to experience it's fun i think that's kind of like the secret ingredient of the game where it feels like oh there's like a living place that like grows alongside my investment in this library it's a really interesting choice and i i just respect the talent on display here like this is such a weird thing to make yeah and to have it be this good too so yeah this this will be something i revisit forever yeah play forever ufo 50 ufo 50

another one about a yippee that i forgot to bring up yeah um you can if you get it on steam there's another one that's available on portmaster um you could just move your steam files over to the sd card and play it on the sp baby okay

of the year is The Legend of Zelda Echoes of Wisdom. Nice. Spectacular game. I have a whole video review of this as well and a large portion of that review is specifically comparing it not that it's always helpful to be just comparing things one to one but this game just really reminded me so much of A Link Between Worlds for Nintendo 3DS which for the longest time was my like maybe this is my number one I have always

favorite zelda game of all time is just like floating between a couple different entries at any given moment what are they currently it's It's always between A Link Between Worlds, Breath of the Wild, and Twilight Princess. Those three, it just really depends on the day and who's asking me in some ways. I have that with Breath of the Wild, Wind Waker, and Ocarina. Those are the three that are kind of the Triforce.

Oh, there you go. A Link Between Worlds was... That was a pitiable... That was not... I haven't eaten today. I know, I know. We're all very hungry.

I just I just dug in and couldn't put it down until I had like literally done everything there was to do which had never really occurred to me to do in a Zelda game until that happened it kind of reintroduced me to why these top-down Zelda games are like worth keeping in a lot of ways like I think at the time that that game came out I wasn't thinking about games as critically as I obviously do now but like

I just remember thinking to myself like, oh, it's really strange that they're deciding to make another top-down Zelda game. Sure. And then as soon as I started playing it, I was like, oh my god, there's a magic here that is so powerful. And it goes back to what I was saying about Pokemon Unbound. Yeah, definitely. In my GoToy list, just kind of teaching me a lot about like...

what's still relevant and what can be fixed up while still maintaining the like gen three idea of what pokemon is a link between worlds was kind of that for me and i feel like echoes of wisdom takes that to as far and extreme as humanly possible it's like the equivalent once again of Super Mario Wonder but for Zelda in a lot of ways

And I think it's so powerful that Zelda gets to be the protagonist of this one. One thing I didn't dig into in my review as much as I had intended to initially, I had like a whole really big section of this that I kind of removed in post. I do think that my big gripe with the game is in a lot of ways Zelda's story because it centers so much around Link and the like Link as the hero and the person who will save the world once Zelda can save Link so it's like

she kind of gets pushed into the background a little bit. But... still her experience and her having like an actual arc over the course of the game and i think there was a little bit of hubbub about like why doesn't like why doesn't zelda get to have a sword and like i think it's actually in a lot of ways more powerful that she has like her own thing going for her right especially considering like

the Triforce as an idea is supposed to be the personifications of wisdom, power, and courage. I think having Zelda's power set in this game revolved mostly around the idea of putting that wisdom into effect. Pretty much the entire game is an open-ended puzzle that needs to be kind of like solved over the course of play. And that can happen literally any way that you choose.

because the central mechanic of the game is that she has this rod that allows her to copy and replicate any item or enemy that she finds throughout the adventure. So when you're moving through space... and there is an obvious path forward and you come up with something completely bizarre and maybe unintentional, I think that that imbues

into the player the feeling that you always had in Zelda games when you would make your way through a dungeon and be able to solve a room or beat a boss or whatever but you're getting that like dopamine hit almost over and over and over and over again in just like the normal traversal from point a to point b and i think finding a way to gamify just like getting around hyrule

as much as you are gamifying everything else that is like core to the Zelda experience is really, really interesting. And so much of that stems from a group of people sitting down in a room and saying, zelda's protagonist what does that mean yeah and coming out the other end with the game like egos of wisdom i think is a huge fucking flex first of all but b they like

they just nailed it. Like they just, they just made, I think one of the best top down Zelda games that I've ever played. Um, and now kind of, in a lot of ways has like opened my mind to what I want out of Zelda and I think that that's kind of the more powerful thing for me is like

When I'm playing a Zelda game, what are the core tenets that I take away from that? And what are the things that I expect versus what are the things that I want them to subvert? And Echoes of Wisdom has totally... opened the the walls out or like just blown the walls out and like it turns out there's a whole

field around me of possibility and it feels like we're just kind of scratching the surface so I think a lot of this is due to the success of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom definitely like so much of what is successful about what is going on mechanically in this game is pulled directly from Tears of the Kingdom You can tell that they were developed kind of simultaneously in a lot of ways. But still, it does feel like it is yet another branching path in Hyrule history.

It does. It feels, it does feel like a third pillar in some ways. Cause like. like especially as the 3d zeldas have ventured into open world design previously the top-down zeldas were basically okay we'll keep doing this sort of traditional style here yeah and it wasn't until link between worlds where that was like in some ways testing the idea of a non-linear zelda and this i wonder what this is a test for if anything because right

I would love to see Zelda lead another game. I really hope this isn't a one-off. I really like this game. This is probably another yippee added to the pile. It's catching on. It's funny to say yippee with like a shrug. That's another one. Um, I think what, and you mentioned like learning what you want about Zelda. I think what I'm realizing, I love tears of the kingdom. I think it's a masterpiece. I do slightly prefer breath of the wild. which I think is kind of its own hot take.

i'm learning that i i do kind of like the more authored ones more like i i i don't really get a lot of enjoyment from the like i like how breath of the wild for example gives you these shrine puzzles and then it's like

there's a way to solve it but they leave just enough wiggle room where you can kind of cheese it or you can kind of like do something else and i also like how in tears of the kingdom like the shrines limit the amount of tools you have so there is still that like okay i need to meet

meet the game at some level even if i'm doing something different i found at least the early hours of echoes of wisdom to be maybe a little bit loose in that way where i felt like what i eventually got to work i wasn't fully sure why because we had so many echoes but it is really cool. And I think just even trying to mesh like an ultra hand S mechanic into the top-down style.

it paints a really promising future for this series that like they are willing to take chances in the sort of retro top-down style yeah um i definitely want to play more of it because i imagine that i'll probably warm up to it over time but It was I mean, it was helpful to be like, OK, I actually maybe do kind of miss the like this dungeon was built around the boomerang. I think it was really important for them to stop doing that and like try out different things because I think like.

I hear this sentiment a lot too that people are like a little bit exhausted by open worlds and Juan Zelda to go back to like the 3D style but I'm also like but if they didn't if they just did like Skyward Sword and kept doing that people people were already getting really sick of that style yeah so i guess what this means is like i'm really excited at the idea that based on where tears of the kingdom and echoes of wisdom have you know where where those games

explore it creates a really exciting future for zelda because i truly don't know what they're going to do next yeah you know that's i think the best feeling to have in a series that like pretty much doesn't miss you know there isn't even the ds sequels there isn't a bad Zelda game. I've enjoyed each of them.

Even the weaker ones feel like if you took Zelda off of it, this would be like a cult classic on the Wii or something weird, you know? Wow. That's it. Echoes of Wisdom. Number six. Wowsdom. Yeah. Hey there, this is Chase from Video Game Podtimism and also .zip. I think not going to be a shocker if you've listened to either of those shows is a thousand times resist. I was really blown away by this video game. I think it is remarkable in

I'm a sci-fi guy. I like the science fiction. I like space and the spaceships and stuff. And I was amazed at how it was able to tell this incredible science fiction story while still being super duper grounded in the human experience. depicting, that is a tightrope that I am shocked they were able to walk. It defied my expectations about what video games can do, what they need to do, what they should do, and for that I am eternally grateful. to this video game. It is incredible.

Pecciolmo, all those things. You get it. Hey, while you're here, let me hit you with one of my Go Toys. This isn't my actual Go Toy pick. But I played Butterfly Soup, this visual novel this year. Man, this is a good video game. I like very recently have gotten into visual novels, and this is one of them. And I would really recommend it, especially if you're like me and maybe don't have a ton of experience with visual novels. It's just like short is an incredibly earnest and sweet work.

And the art's great. And I loved playing through it. And I think you might too. Anyway, thanks for listening here. And thanks for listening to Into the Aether. They probably say that. I probably don't need to say that, but thanks anyway. We'll see you next year, gamers. Okay, goodbye. What's your number six, AJ? My number six. I've been listening, to be clear. I didn't play Echoes of Wisdom and the 2D...

Zelda's and Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom aren't really super my shtick, so I knew I wasn't gonna have anything really to contribute. Yeah I love that. What a great breakfast.

i've been rearranging four through six in my head no i know what you mean okay i need to like yeah exactly yeah yeah um but i do totally agree steven with what you said about uh preferring the more authored experiences that was my big this is not what this is for my i've so i've been reordering my four through six yeah my number six now is fear the spotlight oh uh another game we played for dot zip a really really good game

I like the title a lot. It's very provocative. This is the first of whatever lineup of Blumhouse Blumhouse, the film company now doing games. yeah um and this is by a game called cozy games inc uh which is funny uh because it is a horror game uh it styles itself after you know like ps1 style you know silent hill resident evil those all that kind of thing and but you play as uh

you play as a young woman, uh, who sneaks into school one night with her best friend. They do, uh, a seance with a Ouija board, uh, and stuff goes wrong. Whoa. Uh, and it's, yeah, it's, it's, It's really great. So then her friend goes missing and you have to rescue your friend. But surprise, you have a crush on your friend. Ooh.

uh another layer um anyway uh so yeah it's just like yeah uh it is yeah it's it is a really good game i think it took me like three hours to play it um which you know is a great length for video game uh yeah it's it's good i mean as a horror game i have seen people online say that it is like like not scary enough quote unquote or it's like like it's really good if it's your first horror game or whatever which is like I feel kind of derisive in a way that it doesn't really need to be like

it is as scary as it needs to be uh which is the conclusion i come to on the dot zip episode like it didn't need to to be like a a you know a pyramid head stalking you from the distance style thing of like even uh like i think sometimes I think of like horror sometimes as like spice level as well yeah it's like to have it be hot for the sake of hot right scary like that goes back to the sort of the this sort of like streamer bait stuff yeah like

I think the best horror works without the horror as well. Yeah, and it really does help drive home the message of the game, which is I think that the real horror is a real thing in real life and not like the monsters.

sure um which i think is you know a lot of what good horror does anyway yeah um but the the horror in this game is the horror of being perceived uh by like people that aren't like they are looking at you they are not seeing you um and that is i stole from kim who who said that on the episode so just i want to give that credit um but that that really is what that game especially as as a young woman like to be looked at by somebody

is especially like somebody, you know, who is like an authority figure. That is a lot of what this game is about and how it's like, you know, you don't really necessarily want that attention and how that attention can like hurt more than just.

the the the person being being looked at it's just it's like a really fun game and it does um the there are two distinct halves of this game and the first part is very much like walking through kind of a broken down place and trying not to be seen by this enemy who is...

just a a human body with a giant spotlight for a head oh uh and so you are like you can act you can see where they're looking because of the light obviously um but your whole object is to not be seen by them and there's lore don't worry um But yeah, so you're walking through this broken down place trying not to be seen. And then the second one is more the second half of the game, I would say, is more about looking inward and like seeing yourself.

uh which i think was really really i don't know it was like a kind of a big swing for them to kind of completely shift gears in in the second half of the game but also still make it make thematic and mechanical and like gameplay sense uh and they achieved that really really well uh and uh yeah i think i think that's really all i have about the game there's a whole podcast episode about it too if you want to say because i'm sure i'm

missing some thoughts about it. But it's just like a really, really good game with a good story and a really good approach.

to this style of horror that is like like i said as scary as it needs to be um it sounds awesome i'm really intrigued by that because i've been getting more into games that are like like the paper lily series so far as like definitely a horror game but it does have like it it leads with more of being a drama that's yeah elements same thing with paranormal site i would say yeah so yeah i would definitely check this out yeah it's great you played a lot of horror this year

yeah we talked about it on on dot zip but we started oct we named it october because it was we didn't come up octopath travel i was like wow no a bold choice for dot zip An incredible horror game also. Incredible short horror game. We were playing a bunch of, you know, short horror games for October.

And we kind of didn't stop through the end of the year. Yeah. And it's... i don't know it's really interesting to see like dots up has taught me a lot about video games like what i want from a video game and you know all that stuff but yeah it is it has definitely shown me that a lot of short games like short indie games you know single developer games are horror games

like a lot of the stuff that's out there again that I did not bring up for my go toys that maybe I should have is a game called anatomy yeah which is just another horror game of like you're walking through a spooky house and then it you know i have noticed a lot of itch leans horror yeah like even if it's not like again it has like horror elements yeah and i i'm curious why that is yeah i think it's something to do with like you know to paint with a very broad brush like

Single developer games are a lot about like... or they draw from the developer's life experience. And I think a lot of the time, the life experience of many people... is just like it's kind of a horror to be alive in some ways not in a way that's like i you know i wish i wasn't alive but in a way that it's just like it's scary to exist

in in some ways um and and you know i think if you're i think for for many people like when you're when you're going to make art about that i do think it's easier to get to yeah like think about it through a horror lens i also wonder if like Like aesthetically, you know, because a lot of horror leans retro with the sort of available tools, it might be kind of not like.

Not that you're always going to make what's easier, but I feel like you could probably make a really effective horror game on a smaller budget than you could like an action adventure game or something. I do think it is a bit of a zeitgeist thing as well. We're just kind of in that moment.

yeah um with those like ps1 style you know modeling tools like becoming very available to people but yes i played a lot of hard games how are you feeling i'm good i'm great honestly like every single one of these except my health washing like ends on a note that i'm like You know what? You give me a lot to think about. I do really, you know, because I think... Even if the game is about the horrors of living like.

At the end of it, it is like, but... spite of that you must live because of you know whatever whatever positive and that could be a really powerful message especially coming from a horror game yes exactly yeah yeah because it shows you everything that like sucks and is scary but then at the end of it is like but this exactly the power of friendship and the power of friendship yeah yeah so cool horror

Well, that's 10 through 6. We're 10 through 6. We're going to take a break here and then come back with 5 through 1. 5 through 1. I cannot wait. I know it's weird to say, but I'm having a lot of fun. Yes. I'm happy to be here in person. Yeah. Yeah. Let's get something. Let's get lunch for once and come back. Let's eat some food. Yeah. And then we'll come back and do five through one. Oh God. Bye everybody. Bye. The horror of being unfed. I'm full. Oh, sorry. That was such a good...

Oh, sorry. You want to do that again? You can do it again. Yeah, go for it. My tummy is still... It's been an hour, dear listener. It's been, yeah. We had a really good lunch, dinner combo. It was a late lunch. Yeah. shout out to a great restaurant which i won't name because i don't want to dox our friends shout out to a place with good food shout out to a place with good hey if you're a place out there that has good food this is for you this is for you thanks

Thanks for keeping us fed, baby. We're back with 5 to 1. 5 to 1, which almost sounds like a 1,000 times resistance. Red to blue. Yes. I'm excited. I'm excited to hear what your number five is, Stephen. But first, what did you order for lunch? I had a few drinks. I had a Moscow mule variant with moonshine. It was a moonshine mule, which was great. Then I had an all-day IPA. And then I had a grilled chicken sandwich with Swiss and garlic mayo. It's good that we're sitting far apart.

between the mule and the garlic aioli it must be you've invented a new smell I smell like a music festival halfway through And fries. Day three of the music festival. Day three of Pitchfork. Yeah. It's like Chicago Diner had some interesting corn dogs this year. How are you doing? What'd you eat? I had a... I had a... I was gonna... I had a chicken sandwich as well. Mine had gouda on it, a big, thick slice of gouda, which honestly rocked.

um and i had unsweetened iced tea because although i don't drink caffeine anymore i was like i should have a little bit a little a little perk that's that's a little low amount yeah it was a low amount i usually unsweetened iced tea is my go-to if i'm not living a little yeah yeah then i get the mule yeah mule aj what did you eat i had a cubano nice but i'm lactose intolerant and i left my uh lactate at the house so no so i got vegan cheese that's why i asked for vegan cheese

confused for a second because a cubano has pork on it and they were like why are you getting yes it's yes vegan cheese on a pork sandwich it's the it was a lactose thing anyway uh and i had onion rings as well nice so Do you have any sandwiches which you got? I'm sorry. So Yippies. Oh, no. If I ate it. I'm having such a hard time deciding we should come into this bit.

or smash the eject button as hard as possible like break glass in case of emergency i think if we were deeper into our list and didn't have an actual deadline to get out of this apartment i would commit to it yeah you know what i will say one actually just to wrap up the lunch bit. We were going to talk about this in the next episode, but maybe this is a nice thing to end this bit on. We just decided at lunch what our season premiere is going to be next year.

sandwiches it's gonna be sandwiches it's gonna be the the sony play sandwich portable it's gonna be the best console to play while you're eating a sandwich we're doing the psp yeah I am so excited because we basically after GameCube, I mean, we talked about how we had like kind of over kind of overbooked ourselves from last December till August.

which is why we took you know a bit of a break from bonus episodes for a bit and we were also thinking like maybe not another console episode but we're thinking about maybe scaling back the prep process a little bit and PSP like we had lunch and we're like

I don't want to do a PSP episode. We all were like, Steven introduced this topic of conversation as what do we do if we're not doing a console episode? And then you had an idea and you had an idea and it came to me and I was like, I kind of want to do a console again. And then Steven was like, you know, I've been thinking that too a little bit. I was thinking about the PSP and I was like,

I was about to say PSP and then AJ was like I was also going to say PSP so obviously we're doing the PSP and if you listen to the show long enough Chances are you probably were thinking like PSP is next. You're also thinking PSP. We haven't done a Sony console yet. And we also haven't, I mean, the first Sony console, but we tend to cover handhelds and kind of slightly more obscure consoles.

uh psp obviously was successful but like i do think it's a little bit kind of uh dreamcast adjacent so it'd be a lot of fun to cover it it feels obscure now in in ways yeah yeah definitely but also i think i think one of the things that at least I wanted to get back to one of the reasons I thought PSP was a good solve here was just the fact that it's like

easy to emulate easy to get games like they're widely available psps are widely available i just i ordered a psp off etsy like two months ago um and i've been having a great time with it you're reflecting on the prep for every console episode it's like ds was really painless because it was like yeah we chose that idea like around this time of year yeah and we had like six months to just sort of like take our time with a bunch of games

gamecube was a lot yeah it was like you really got it like i i played some of those games on steam deck but a lot of it i wanted to have the controller you know and same so it just like that I think having a, not that it will always be a handheld console, but it does make the prep easier because it's easier to play. Totally. Yeah. So look forward to that sometime in like probably July, August, the summer, the summer.

Five to one. Ready to dive back in? Yeah, let's do it. Number five. Do you have more sandwich content for us? I'm really trying to think of an acronym for PSP, but all I got is like... It is one already. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I'm trying to think of like a sandwich acronym for PSP. Can you imagine being such a big PSP fan?

in it like you bring your pee you want to play the weird twist the metal game on pee pee um hey what's your five yeah number five let's uh move away from like nightmare i love the energy in the second half it's always no this is great So wild. That's why we have to say like we had lunch. Any other show would just move on. Right. And we're like, we just had lunch. What'd you eat? I'm excited. I love that we reveal everything. I've often... Okay, let's move on. Remind listeners what...

10 to 6 are for you. 10 for me was Dragon's Dogma 2. 9 was Unicorn Overlord. I always say Overload by accent. unicorn overload I do that a lot different game yeah that would be like an adult swim game um eight is one thousand times resist six is ufo 50 five persona 3 reload oh baby uh this is the remake of persona 3 persona 3 fez

spoilers, I guess, for our Games of the Decade episode. Skip ahead if you don't want to know, but Persona 3 Fez was one of our top five for the decade, the 2000s, because... you found the plot of this game so moving that it applied retroactively to the-

Not even the original game, but the first definitive version of the original game. So... i think this is an incredible remake um i am someone like my first persona was persona 5 like a lot of people i played that when it came out and then i went backwards so when i had finished persona 5 this is right before we started the show and I kind of credit Persona 5 getting me back into video games in like a big way because I played Persona 5 and I was like oh my god this is exactly like

I think at that time, especially, Persona 5 felt like, oh, this is the new Final Fantasy in some ways. Obviously, we were still getting Final Fantasy, but that felt like, oh, this is maybe the future of RPGs. And so I went backwards and I got from my PS2, I got Persona 4 and I got Persona 3 Fez. And I played Persona 4 to completion like immediately after 5. I was prepping for a one day bonus, I think, without knowing the show would even exist.

and then i got to persona 3 fez and at that point i had played so much persona that i was like when i close my eyes i see a calendar like i need to stop yeah but i still put in like 30 hours and i liked persona 3 but i found it was kind of hard to go backwards like persona 3 uh before reload the the 2024 remake um has a lot of versions to it but all the versions are like a little bit of a trade-off for like persona 3 and persona 3 fez uh all your party mates are ai controlled

So you can give them tactics, but you can't give them direct commands, which is like, it's not a deal breaker, but it's not ideal as someone who completed Persona 3 Fez. I didn't think it added to it, but it's just not ideal for most people. Like it's just like I'd rather control them, have a higher level of strategy. It does kind of add to this feeling that like it is you.

as the protagonist and like your friends are their own people with their own minds and agendas but that's stretching it a little bit i think you're mostly just like why can't i tell this person to use cure um uh but like fez in the original um you know have that issue with like just sort of like the game being very punishing very easy to kind of lock your progress by like saving too close to a full moon boss and not realizing you had to be like 10 levels higher

and then just having no option. Like you're just like stuck. so having to keep a lot of backup saves it was also the first persona to have this style of like the calendar system s links you know gamifying friendships and relationships um so a lot of it was great and innovative but a lot of it hadn't really been fully polished yet like yeah and persona 3 and persona 3 fez

characters will get mad at you if you haven't talked to them in a while which is just like gone like that is not in any other game yeah um so it's just like you know stuff like that but it's part of that and I kind of mentioned this earlier is like

some of those systems like tartarus for example which is the game's main dungeon that you kind of have to like schedule yourself like the like in four and five there are sort of dungeons that mark like okay this chapter of the game is about this character And this is their dungeon. So in five, it's all about the villains and like you're going into the villain's head and fighting the source of their desires.

and in four you're actually saving your friends from like their you know like internal uh it's sort of like celeste like their kind of other self manifests and they're dealing with that um And three, it's just like just this creepy ass dungeon that your high school turns into at midnight and you have to climb it as much as you think.

And then you'll find out how much you actually needed to do once it's a full moon. You had to fight the full moon boss. That can be really intimidating and really unfriendly to the player. But it also makes it your responsibility. And I do think that there are some edges to Tartarus.

in the original game that are a little bit sanded off in the remake that i kind of miss we talked about that a bit brendan of like the fact that in three and three fez and even in portable um if you're in tartarus for too long your characters will like get sick or like asked to leave so you kind of have to budget your time okay this week I'm hanging out with these friends on Monday Tuesday Wednesday

thursday is tartarus but only up until this floor and i do kind of miss that decision making all that aside and also worth noting the absence of the female protagonist is probably the biggest bummer about the remake. All that aside, all the sort of nitpicks and like... you know things i like about the originals like kind of the reason why it's worth powering through three is because it i think easily has the best story of all the modern persona games

And what Reload gives the player is like a way to experience that narrative in a game that is truly just more fun and easier to play. Like as much as I can nitpick certain things like... This is the version I would recommend to most people, and this is the version I will replay when I want to revisit these characters.

yeah there's enough newness to it that even for me someone who beat fez only a couple years ago it does feel like a fresh experience and i do think despite being despite being so long um the persona games are replayable for that reason like you'll want to revisit these characters and to have like this sort of uh pseudo life back you know this schedule and this routine that kind of feels like your own um and i just i i haven't seen persona 3 reload

to the end yet um i obviously know what happens they beat the original i got to like september i believe so i'm definitely in like you know where things kind of pop off yeah um this is also a game like you know i mentioned how i started and then kind of shelved it and then got back to it years later like all the plot happens in the last like three months like it's pretty slow and in the original games too like the characters are very slow to trust one another

i think that happens a little faster in reload uh but still like the bulk of the plot and sort of like the themes of the game all kind of like fully come to the surface and maybe the last act but that kind of retroactively makes the whole experience feel worth it and that's the magic trick of all these games is like tartarus feels tedious this schedule might be like

you know you always feel like you're spending your time the wrong way and then when your time with the game actually ends you just feel grateful for the whole thing and for a game about death i think that being without spoiling that is kind of the message the message i found at least when i finished fez it sort of has this very positive view of life and positive view of mortality specifically that like life is beautiful because it ends

And like, it's hard to really like, I love four and five, but like, what a hard act to follow. Like, how do you. follow a game that kind of gives you the meaning of life.

so you know i i had trouble placing this game because like persona 3 means so much to me and is one of my favorite like narrative experiences with the game and i love these characters i love this combat system i love this remake but i also had already played it and it's a remake so i thought like five was the perfect spot for it for me but yeah i i think it's a remarkable remake and uh yeah i love it it's great wow

And how do you rate the sandwich you ate? No, I'm just kidding. No, I think your point about the slowness of the narrative for a while is really interesting because... in the beginning of the game when they first introduce you to like here's how wild everything is and also you need to go into hell every every night and go fight demons uh with with these people who hate you like over and over again

It's, I think, really interesting in retrospect when you're done with the game to look back on, I would say, the first two acts.

and realize that they're about introducing you to a horrible existence and then realizing over time, like... even that can become the norm for you like you can even find solace in something that is like objectively horrible the fact that all of these people have been like thrown together in this space where they need to like save everything and again visit hell every night is like

kind of remarkable that they bond at all yeah in that kind of environment um and you get to a point and this i don't think spoils anything but you get to a point where like some of them you know when when you're getting towards the end of the game and it's like i think we're gonna fucking do this like I think we're gonna save the world Some of the characters almost lament that. They're like, but I've kind of grown used to this.

and i'm gonna miss you guys when it's done because there's kind of like a team rocket who that's their whole vibe is like they want to keep the dark hour going because they like having these powers right And that goes back to like kind of being like pro mortality is like, it does have to.

like it has no meaning if it continues indefinitely right you know yeah um and of course having a robot in the mix just in case you didn't get the musings on life and identity you know you have a robot companion who's questioning but i mean i guess i mean she steals the show for a number of reasons but it's interesting her voice performance is a little bit different in the original game she sounds way more robotic earlier on and slowly becomes more and more human and it's like really

striking oh interesting when she talks like a person like in the answer for example she talks like yeah you and i would talk you know um i'm also really excited to play episode i guess i haven't gotten to it yet but i haven't finished it it's great though yeah i kind of want to go back and play the answer just to kind of see what's up you know

But yeah, I thought this is a remarkable remake and definitely one of my favorite. We've talked about it a lot on the show. So probably not a huge surprise. It's up there for me. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Number five. Persona 3. Hey guys, it's Alana. I am calling in from the very living room in which she recorded most of this episode. And I don't know if you can actually hear, but in the background are the dulcet tones of the... Metaphor Re Fantasio game menu.

my game of the year. I am so obsessed with this game. I started grad school this semester and so I really did not have as much time to play games as I tend to and maybe would prefer but I'm probably 60 hours into this one which is quite a feat and I love it. I just think the way it combines kind of a, you know, persona style calendar system. I love, love, love the new archetype battle system. Even the story and the setting, I think, just works so well. Like, there's elements of Octopath.

too i think that like work really well here anyway i'm just so so taken with this game and having the best time. I wished I could have finished it by now, but I'm also really happy that I have the rest of winter break to do so. And quick shout out to my honorable mention, Goaty, which would have been my Goaty, I think, up until I started playing this, which was Persona 3 Reload.

Already I thought that that game was just sort of like best in class as far as what you can what kind of story and narrative you can tell using again the sort of persona style calendar system but it was a hard game to recommend.

previously like there was some real clunkiness some real just quality of life stuff that like made it you know a slog in certain parts and i think the way they sort of sanded off those edges but retained the spirit uh in reload is is just so magical and so yeah atlas sort of uh superseded atlas i would say in my estimation this year um but anyway i hope you guys Have a wonderful new year. And thank you so much for the show and for everything. And Tuesday says hi.

All right. Number five for me, I'll start with my recap. Number 10, Earth Defense Force 6. Number nine, Gunshow. Number eight, Astro Bot. Number seven, Metaphor, ReFantasio. Number six... The Legend of Zelda Echoes of Wisdom. And number five... under the wire indiana jones and the great circle uh oh yeah snagging the hat from under the closing door baby under the closing door i like that as a phrase like your fifth one is snagging the hat um i mean

we just talked about this on the last episode so again like this is probably also not a huge surprise considering I like just spoke at you for 60 straight minutes about how great it is but this is a game that I also haven't been able to finish in time and my thought was like

Like by the time you and I talked, it had made it to this spot. And I was like, if I finish this, it could go even higher. And I didn't get to finish it with the amount of time that I had, which is sad, but already where it's at.

having talked to some people who have finished it knowing it'll probably stick the landing like this is at least better than temple of doom which is an amazing thing to say about an indiana jones video game knowing the history of indiana jones video games yeah wow you know like

thinking that canonically of the indiana jones media i would like to experience and revisit i would rather replay the great circle than watch temple of doom is like a fascinating thing to even be considering considering my my headspace going into this was so just kind of like mired in i don't i don't know this feels like troy baker really and first person what's up with that um but i mean they nailed it it feels as we talked about a lot like

kind of a new idea you know there are there are bits and pieces that they're taking from other games like every single thing that happens in Indiana Jones the Great Circle does feel like an homage or or a pluck from another game that you've played before but But in the aggregate and put all together, it feels quintessentially Indiana Jones in a way that I'm like...

floored by um and uh i think it's great i i actually don't even really have that much more to say about it i can't wait to play it i'm really excited you've like fully sold me on it i think you are really gonna like it i think honestly what one of the things that has happened since recording that episode and one of the things that has been the most interesting is like watching some stuff pop up online as people figure out new ways to use the immersive sim elements in like

fun kind of creative avenues that i had never thought about like one of the things for example that you get during your experience in the vatican is a lighter that you can then use to like light torches when you're like you know going through tombs and stuff um but

somebody figured out that you can actually get adventure points by burning fascist posters around the Vatican. I love that. So if you find a poster, they'll just hang it up. You could just light your lighter and just like light it ablaze. And as long as nobody sees you, you get a bunch of adventure points. stuff like that is like amazing and people are just figuring out new things like that all the time which is so so cool it's an extremely dense video game um

some of the stuff that they've managed to pull off is amazing. I'm in a portion now that is like extremely linear, which is really fun after however many hours it's been of just like really intense kind of open world experiences. And honestly, I have found some of the pacing to be a little bit off in that way where

it feels a little bit like ghost of Tsushima where it's like, you could spend your whole time on that first Island and then realize the game is three times as large as that and be like, Oh my God, but I already spent 50 hours here. I don't want to do that again. Two more times. Right. Um,

And similarly with the Vatican, it was like, I did everything there was to do in the Vatican. And then I moved on to the next place, which I won't give away. But when I got there, I was like... I don't know if I have that in me and I think I mentioned this on the episode but like it does in some ways feel like it's inspiring second playthroughs like it is inspiring me

to think about what I will do the next time I come in here and if there are other ways of accomplishing the same goals next time around. Some things that are like main mission markers are things that you can kind of go out of your way to accomplish in different ways. Some of them are even like, you need to get three of these 10 things that are littered around this area. You can get them in any order. And by going and visiting the different spots on the map that contain those things.

you will just inevitably like bump into a guy who is like screaming about something and then you'll be like how do I help you and then you help him and that's a that's a whole like separate That's a whole like separate side quest. You can go down and just like experience all this new stuff. Yeah. It's.

it's great and i'm loving again i'm just loving like scrolling through social media and seeing cut scenes like from the vatican and from even earlier than that of things that i like didn't even see there's this like great cutscene that I keep seeing people post that's like Indiana Jones while he's in the Vatican he's dressed like a priest that's like kind of how you get around is like just pretending to be a priest and there's a Nazi who like pulls him into a confessional to like

just kind of start confessing all of his sins and like that scene is amazing and i didn't see it i was in the area where that happened and i did some cut scene or i did some side quests in that area and i just like never ran into that scene so i'm just like how much other stuff is hidden in this game that is such a strong homage to literally one of my favorite things ever made by people um it's uh i just i feel like i'm eating real good you know yeah

I think you've said a version of this already, but I think a lot of publications and award shows are going to include this for next year. It just feels like it's really catching on now, and it came out a little bit too late. That's happened before. I think Smash Brothers Ultimate.

was also a december release and i think it was nominated for something at the game awards the following year yeah um i think i think next year is gonna you know we'll talk about next year a little bit later but like I think next year is going to be really tough considering some of the stuff that's coming out, but I think Indiana Jones is already in a really good...

spot in terms of those conversations yeah yeah and even just you know it's cool to see people enjoying it i'm pumped to check it out yeah i'm looking forward to being on your go toy list yeah The Great Sandwich. So what's... Recap your 10 to 6, AJ. My 10 to 6. It was the sausage egg and cheese that I had from Wawa this morning. Oh, my God. Number 10, Arctic Eggs. Number nine, Sheepy, A Short Adventure. Then Home Safety Hotline, Mouthwashing, and Fear the Spotlight at number six.

And my number five is a game called 10 dead doves. uh the number 10 just to be clear you're typing it out there i am typing them 10 10 that sounds like a hitchcock film hitchcock film there's i mean there's birds in it there you go yeah that's the connection um yeah this This is another like Resident Evil Silent Hill style. How long is it? How long does it take to beat? About eight hours. oh it's on the cusp of a yes that's about the length of all of the other games on your list combined yeah

I was kind of angling for like, we should rank all of our lists based on how long they take to beat. And I was really enjoying the idea of like, you could play aj's entire game of the year list in the time it takes to play like part one you could probably play at least 10 to 7 before you even get to play in metaphor yeah actually you you could you could play

You can play your 10 to 6 in the amount of time it would take to see the title screen of Earth Defense Force 6. That rogs. Anyway, sorry, 10 Dead Dubs. 10 Dead Dubs is a game that I saw at an X... I played the demo of for 10 minutes and went, yeah, and then shut the game off. It came out like... I love NextFest.

two or three weeks ago is a recent one oh i kind of this is that talk about what was it grabbing the hat yeah grab snagging the hat yeah i played it over the last two days i finished it last night um and it is It's an incredible game. It is absolutely so striking. So you play as this guy named Marcus.

You are hiking, not the Appalachian Trail, but you're hiking along one of the trails that is on the Appalachian Trail. I guess for those of you not in America or don't know what the Appalachian Trail is, it's this big, long... hiking trail that goes all the way up the east coast that takes like i don't know something like 130 days to hike the whole thing or something but yeah it takes forever you know you can visit any section of the trail yeah it's very popular to go like hike

for like a week in the Appalachians right yeah you just like choose a section of it and you like like all of maryland or something i've done it a couple of times yeah yeah just like little bits of it yeah um so so they uh They're on the Appalachian Trail looking for this thing called the Appalachian Ant Farm, which is not a real thing, not a real folkloric thing. But Appalachia, the region of the United States in general, is very like.

like there's a lot of folklore uh about you know like not necessarily all monsters or whatever, but just like there's stories about things that happen in in appalachia and there's like this very common thing of like if you hear your name whispered in the woods when nobody's around in appalachia no you didn't uh because like it's like some spirit trying to like steal you or something So stuff like that. So yeah, the vibes.

Yeah, the vibes are there for something like this. I go by Steven. Thank you. You ain't snagging this hat. But it's these two guys who are like, you know, in their mid to late 30s or whatever. And they're kind of just like, you know, you start the game out just like hiking through this kind of random part of the trail, you know, looking for this.

this secret place uh you do find out eventually what the legend of the ant farm is and you know like why they're out here doing it but that's not for a while so i'm not going to spoil that what's like the genre of game like what's yeah it's so it's like it is like a silent hill resident evil style horror game control horror yeah tank tank controls especially it is tank controls yeah uh which

fucks it's so i've never played a game with tank controls besides lorelei and the laser eyes in certain moments also a yippee that i forgot to bring up Did it. and the tank controls honestly fuck they're so good uh i played a bunch of this game on my on my pc uh my partner tara and i have our computers next to each other and so she was like glancing over like watching me play her game while she was like doing work or whatever and she asked

She was like, oh, how's the game going? I was like, oh, it's great. She said, it looks like you're watching a lot. Like, it looks like there's a lot of cut scenes. I'm like, oh, no, I've been playing the entire time. But just like the way that tank controls work.

and like the pre-rendered backgrounds and stuff interesting yeah oh it's like those kind of fixed camera it's fixed camera angles yeah yeah yeah fixed camera angles and so like as you're walking through places it will it will shift angles that's really cool it's really

it's directed really well there are moments where like you're just walking through the woods and it's like you know it's the woods so it's like kind of creepy i guess it's like before sunset so the sun's still out and then all of a sudden you walk off screen and so the camera changes to another camera angle and it's a dutch angle so the whole thing is sideways

Uh, and you're like, Oh shit, what's about to happen. That reminds me a lot of the resident evil one remake on game cube. They use a lot of stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, and so it does, it does a lot in terms of storytelling through it. like the visual language of the game, which is really, really amazing. There are these like dream sequences that take place in this white void against like stark black.

backgrounds that are wild that stuff happens in the first 10 minutes that's like in the demo and that was the thing that got me to be like yeah I'm gonna play this game there's this like big creepy kind of like

got like a pointy head kind of like one of the spy versus spy spies oh yeah he's got like a pointy head no like facial features or anything and then wearing like park ranger clothes and has like these really like really wide shoulders and long fingers and he's just typing on like three typewriters

with just like papers stacked around him and he's just a character that keeps just kind of like showing up randomly throughout the game uh that's like you don't find out who who or what that character is for a while um he's the doves but he is he is around and it is just Ah, it's so good. I wouldn't even like...

A lot of the times when I like a narrative game, I like it because I really enjoy it thematically and what the game is trying to say. This game, I think, does have a perspective and stuff and does have themes, obviously.

trying to say something but like for the most part it's just like written so well and voiced acted so well uh and the controls feel great and the directing is great it's like it just feels like watching a really good show yeah but you are like participating in it which is which makes it

It's really just an incredible, incredible game that I had so, so much fun playing. I was like, I was both laughing out loud at my computer screen. And then at one point I yelled so loud because I got... scared that Tara yelled from the other room are you okay yeah like she thought I had hurt myself because I got so spooked and so it's just like it's written so well and it balances tone so well and it just

oh my god it's it's it's really good i do think part of this fervor is is also you know uh recency bias because i played it last night but like it's still it's an incredible game this what this was my number six and I had moved it up to my top five when you guys were talking about Echoes of Wisdom. Snagged it. Nice. Snagged it.

that's 10 dead doves and oh my god the on top of the visual language of like placing the cameras and stuff the the way that the character models are like uh i don't even know the term like the way they're they're wrapped with like the image that you put around like a 3D model. You know, I mean, you have a 3D model and then you like wrap a picture around it. Like that's how you do it.

like their faces yes yes yes exactly it's very much like Deus Ex but the way they do it is instead of it being like their face is like one solid like face texture that they stretched around it's like the mouth is one texture each of the eyes are a texture the nose is its own texture and it's it's

done in such a way where it's like as they're talking and their mouths are just kind of moving in these like you know four or five preset shapes like the the way they took the pictures is you can see like the flash off of their teeth like when they took the picture they just used a camera with flash on and you can see it on their teeth and it's just it's it's stylized in such a way that is so

striking and off-putting and weird but then by the end of the game you like don't even see it anymore and i was like borderline crying uh at some of the stuff that happens toward the end of the game and even though they look so fucking goofy so that it it's it's a really great game i highly highly highly recommend it like i said it took me about eight hours so yeah i love uh i i feel like i have a fondness for this sort of tank control horror so i'll definitely check it out yeah it's

It was really, I actually played the last like two hours or so with a controller on my TV downstairs and I actually had to turn the tank control. Like I tried to play it normally and I was like, I can't do this. And so I had to turn the tank controls back on and just use the D-pad of my Xbox controller. to tank control this character because it felt better than the normal like wow movement it was great

Yeah, 10 Dead Doves. Really, really good. My number five game of the year. It's confusing when all the titles, like most of our titles have had numbers in it. They're not the number they're placed. Yeah. Yeah. Number five, 10 Dead Doves. Number four for me is another number that doesn't match. It's Dragon Quest III HD 2D Remake. That's also my number four. That's amazing. This was also a snag in the hat release because I got my Steam wrap.

My top three most played games were Trails from Zero, my GoToy, Balotro, and Dragon Quest III. Nice. I just... i this was the only thing i wanted to play for a long period of time yeah same and is still like my i i haven't seen the ending uh i'm probably i think i'm like 40 or 50 hours into it a lot of time into it right away i'm also deep into it um and

it just kind of feels like i haven't played the original at least much of the original dragon quest 3 so this is like my primary experience with this entry it feels like everything we like about dragon quest as a series like in a smoothie like with nothing it's just like here's kind of like the core ingredients of what makes dragon quest great and it's also an entry where they were starting to branch out a little bit past like the immediate formula because after this you have like

every dragon quest after three is kind of like dragon quest but in 3d or like with this right you know and it's kind of refreshing and also inspiring to see like the core works all we need is like flower eggs you know, these kind of basic ingredients, but it does feel like...

there's something and i think a lot of it is the remake just like the orchestral soundtrack the look of it you know like everything about it i just found so transportive and so i think this hands-off approach to an rpg really works for me like

Like a lot of this kind of feels like what I said weirdly enough about Dragon's Dogma 2, where a lot of the fun of Dragon Quest 3 is like, where do you want to go on the map? And how do you want to plan on getting there? Yeah. Especially when you get into like MacGuffin collecting mode. Yes.

you can go anywhere yeah here's the whole world yeah as we mentioned like when we say here's the whole world it's like literally the world map like the world map that we live on now kind of you know and when there are like cut scenes and moments of story it like takes my breath away because I just don't expect them at all right and it's all simple but it just like it's it's like it's just the less is more philosophy the whole game and I don't know I just think it's

it's a remarkable remake and it's an incredible game and I think kind of just showcases what i like about this series and what i like about rpgs in general so just had a great time with it yeah i think i think like sitting back and interrogating why we connected with it so much i do think there is an element of it that's like because it's so distilled it speaks to such like a core piece of our brains in a way right it's like

they don't really need to gloss it up as much as you know i think other games need to not to say that that's like a bad direction to take it right i think like metaphor is a great weird counterpoint to this where it's like

metaphor is as big and bombastic as possible kind of that bell curve we were talking about in a way there's something about Dragon Quest 3 that is like the most distilled version of this that is humanly possible and I think For me, at least, the journey of 2024, in a lot of ways... It started with Dragon Quest I. Yeah.

And being able to play through that game in its entirety and then jump into two and be like, I don't like this game very much. And then I played a little bit of three just to like check it out, knowing that this remake was coming, hoping that it was coming this year because.

Square Enix was like radio silent between announcing this game and then like giving us a release date, which was a multi-year wait. But I think... in that intervening time between checking out three initially early on in the year like January and when the remake came out it just kind of like primed me to have a better understanding of like Where did this franchise come from? And why is 3 the one that really took off with people? And I think when I went back and played 1, as I said, like...

They got a lot right there, but what is not there at all is any semblance really of story or character or narrative or even tone or vibe. It is just... mechanically like the game literally opens with you in front of the king and the king is like there's a bad guy he's across the lake um go find these four things

and then go kill him and like that's the video game and it doesn't really deviate from that at all uh two tries to imbue a little bit more story into it by having a uh having a party with you but that doesn't

really help things that much because the game is still very cut and dry like there's a bad guy go kill him three even dipping its toe into narrative at all and knowing the era that it came out in like how limited they needed to be and how how i think specific they needed to be about every like every single thing that was added to the game needed to be super intentional, needed to really serve a purpose.

I think what's fascinating about that is like It forced them to get really specific about what they included, but also it allows for moments like you're talking about where every once in a while it's like there are lines of dialogue or cut scenes that I absolutely would not expect to be in here.

and those are added literally for flavor just to bring like joy to people or make you feel something you know outside of like what is just moving the plot forward and what is moving the player from point A to point B also just like You and I talked about this a lot in our episode about it, but the idea of having an open world at this time is interesting because right now it is vogue, or it is in vogue, and it has been for a long time.

to have a game feel this open specifically right like open worlds have existed for a long time you know even even looking at like something like grand theft auto 3 technically having this like big 3d open world very exciting for people but that's still a game that pointed you to your next objective at all times which then culminates in the ubisoft style open world of just like icons on a map all over the place but something about dragon quest 3 being like for the first

You're on a pretty linear journey. And then after that, the rest of the world opens up and you can explore it at your heart's content. And you might wander into places that will absolutely fuck your day up immediately because you shouldn't be there yet. But you just need to learn that. It's like running into the skeletons and dark souls. It's like...

Maybe I shouldn't go this way yet. I think the more of Dragon Quest III I play, the more it feels like a masterclass in the basics of what every RPG needs to be. And what you stack on top of that is what makes a game what it is.

outside of that but like Dragon Quest 3 feels like in some ways refreshing now to strip all of that away yes as it was refreshing when it first came out because it was the first one to do it no that's exact it's it's like there and back again you know yeah exactly uh like here's sort of the baseline you have to hit but it doesn't like there are elements of it where you can kind of say oh yeah this was on you know the nes like

But overall, it's kind of amazing how similar the battles are to like 11. You know, there isn't that much they've added since three, which normally would be an insult. but I think it's actually just a testament to three. Yeah, I adore this remake. And I am curious. I watched a video that showed all the different versions of the game. Yeah. Um, and it seems like the, this, if you can emulate this super Nintendo.

or game boy color one that seems to be another like if you want the older style yeah that seems to be the way to go Yeah, the Game Boy Color one is the one that I have been playing most of. It's cool. Yeah, I dipped into it for a couple hours a couple weeks ago just to kind of like have that comparison point in my head.

it's amazing how well it holds up and how much it feels like the thing that you and I are playing now like although obviously it is much glossier and again like graphically sonically even in terms of quality of life they've added a lot of stuff you don't need it as much as you think you do yeah And even like the new and the biggest addition they made was the new class.

yeah and that shows an incredible amount of restraint honestly I think that shows like how sacred this game is to so many right they know it's a don't fuck with this like just kind of leave it and maybe add a couple

bells and whistles here and there. You and I have talked about it. I don't remember if we said this on the show or off the show, but I know we've talked about this, but like, doesn't this just feel like a game you're going to replay over and over and over again? Like, it'll just be a thing you revisit all the time.

And there's a cool system where in the game you can actually choose one of your characters to carry over different save files. So if you wanted to start a new game, you can have like your level whatever sage just like join a new game. Yeah. would love if in Pokemon you could just send like you know your best your starter or someone and like and have like a narrative have them like into the breach backwards in time

Yeah, I think there's also a system where that character can also be like picked up by other players online. Yeah, I think so. That feels like it would have been a street pass thing if this was on 3DS. Wow. I know, right? R.I.P. Yeah, both of our number four. Finally some overlap. Yeah. I'm very happy with that. Yeah, me too. Yeah. Well, I guess that leads us to you, AJ, with your number four. I just had a quick... Does Dragon Quest 3 have a subtitle? It does. Well...

The original was Seeds of Salvation. This one, though, is just HD2D remake. I guess Dragon Quest III, Seeds of Salvation, HD2D. you can't even say it yeah yeah uh but yeah seeds of salvation which i think is a reference because you find seeds throughout the game yeah that are that will increase your stats but it's also like you're giving hope for the future you know right Hey gamers, what's good? It's Kim from .zip and Frog of the Week.

And listen, sky's blue, water's wet. My game of the year is 1000 times resist. If you've listened to .zip at all this year, this is not a surprise to you. This is the best game I have ever played, probably the best story I've ever seen in any piece of media ever. I have played it like three times and I'm already now like... Damn, maybe it's time for number four. I think about it all the time. It occupies my every waking moment. Game good. Go play it. Happy end of the year.

threes of salvation my number four you can't just drop that bomb and keep going i'm gonna do it it's a ranger a role puzzling adventure nice uh a ranger is an extremely fun little game i mean this is a compliment i've been dying to know one of the games you brought up so i want to like have anything to add yeah uh so yeah ranger is great i i played a little only a little bit of this but i had a great time with it yeah it's

It really, really snuck up on me. I had a really fun time playing the demo when the demo first dropped at one of the NextFests this year. And so I was like, okay, cool. I'm looking forward to picking this up. We picked it up for .zip. We talked about it in that episode, obviously.

but I was really surprised by how much grabbed me and like the characters and the themes and the stuff this game is trying to tackle really really surprised me and like on its own I think the So Arranger, I guess for those of you who don't know, is a game that is basically centered around the idea of you as the main character.

traversing the world as if it were a slide puzzle basically so like you wake up in a room in the very beginning of the game uh and then as you you know you have to slide to get out of the room and so it's like

You're in a 4x4 grid, and so when you slide down one, the square that's on the bottom of that grid goes to the top of that grid, and then if you go left and right, the square that's all the way on one side will go to the other side, and so that's the main puzzle mechanic throughout the entire game. And what that solidifies or crystallizes as in a narrative sense. is this idea of like rebellion.

uh like like actual revolutionary rebellion um that is ingrained so deeply that it affects the way that this person moves about the world yeah and like the the very act of them moving about the world is an act of rebellion because it's

it's so antithetical to what everybody else in the game is doing. I was struck by how early on it's almost a point of insecurity where it's like oh when I enter a room I automatically like shuffle where things are. And people are mad at me about it. People hate to see me come in. It reminds me and maybe this was intentional or maybe not but while i was playing i remember thinking that it felt a lot like um the opening of ocarina of time where everyone is like don't fucking leave yeah don't

you leave and then link's like i think i'm gonna leave yeah you need a sword you can't get a sword you're not strong enough for that yeah yeah I feel like every 90s bully is a version of that Kokiri kid who's got, like, red hair. Yeah, he walks back and forth. Roger Klotz. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, so it's... it's just like a really the the writing is very good and fun um the story is honestly the plot gets like very interesting the deeper you get into it and

there are just like some really great characters and character moments within the game. Shout out to Robbie. He's a character who just shows up periodically throughout the game to just like tell you you're doing a good job. Yeah. I love Robbie. Yeah, and you're... Big Robbie head over here. Big Robbie head, yeah. I just said that for Steven. Steven laughs at that joke every time. You're good. Favorite joke.

uh yeah so did you play all the way through it brendan no i didn't finish it um i played a lot of it though okay i got really deep in this is another yippee for me yes yeah i mean i i really talk about like you know like you are saying here like the the fusion of the mechanics and the narrative i think is really brilliant yeah you know because i sometimes

I think the pitfall of like a narrative driven game is that you think of the story before you think of the game. Sometimes they can think they can be at odds with each other or maybe like I mentioned in passing, like sometimes.

visual novels will throw in a gamier element like murder of son of the hedgehog would have been better without the weird sonic ring collection moments that like sometimes it kind of feels like at least to me it can feel like a lack of confidence to like oh we need a gamier part here

So we'll put in the sonic ring section where it's like, I actually was totally cool with just dialogue and, you know, whatever. And I think a ranger is really clever in that. Like they found a mechanic that perfectly. fits with what they wanted to tackle narratively yeah um and i love i love the artwork of this game yeah the artwork is beautiful it's the same guy who did the artwork for braid oh okay yeah yeah so all the characters kind of have that you know

squarish yeah there's a real like indie super group yes that put this together there's like furniture and mattress yeah yeah yeah it's amazing uh yeah it's it's really uh the team is really great but uh i think the game split into like five-ish levels and each level kind of

spins the slide puzzle in a new direction. Like it introduces like a new way to solve the puzzle. And then once you're done that, area you move on to another area there's like combat too right there is kind of combat but that's it's also puzzly of like you have to figure out how to move the sword into the enemy

To then destroy the enemy. And some of the boss battles, too. There are boss battles in this game as well. They, like, really are basically the culmination of all the puzzles you've done in that area. That's cool. Which I think is a really cool interpretation of the, like...

zelda like in this one you get the boomerang and then you use the boomerang to defeat the boss right it's like in this one you are moving uh like doors around so you can change where the tiles slide out and then that's that's like a mechanic for the boss fight It's very cool. So that's.

That's really all I have to say about it. It's a delightful game with a really great story and a really good message, and the art is really pretty and beautiful, and shout out to Robbie. Yeah. Thanks, Robbie. If you have a Netflix account, you can get it on your phone. Yeah, I do have to say, though, caveat, I tried to play it on my phone and hated it. Oh, really? Hated it. Interesting. I started it on Steam Deck.

and then checked it out on my phone and then liked it way more on my phone. I ended up playing through the first two hours again on my phone just because I liked it so much more there. Yeah, I could not. get the hang of the actual literal sliding on the phone. Interesting. Interesting. Chase your bliss. See what happens. A ranger. Ranger.

I'm curious if we have overlap again. I have a feeling we might, but I'm not sure. I don't know. I don't think for this one, because number three for me is Astro Bot. Oh, yeah. No, we don't have overlap. That's funny. You kind of... said a lot of my sentiments about it like I think it's

Just an incredible platformer. Yeah. And it's weirdly, I think it's really, this game is almost begging to be written off accidentally. I feel like it's like, you know, it's the game awards game of the year. It's this.

arguable you know piece of marketing yeah uh the whole premise is rebuilding a ps5 right uh and you know every collectible is like a sony item i think though that's that's a testament to the games like i i find a lot of that to feel authentic and maybe i'm just very i'm a very easy to please person with this stuff but like Again, the polls they're making, like...

you find a res bot you find a soul bad guy bot the puppeteer these are not things that sony is like putting in our face you know so i do think that at least with like the shout outs to games of the past where it feels more like sony marketing is with the consoles where it's like you know it is kind of eerie like in the final sequence

uh groups of characters i guess it's a spoiler but it's not really a story um like in the final like when you're heading towards the boss their consoles are all spaceships and there will be like a group of astrobots on each console of the past that helps you out yeah and it's all building up to the ps5 and it's like who's is bug snacks gonna save me like it kind of reminds me like we've talked about this a lot but it's like

The PS5's legacy is so ambiguous. I think it's a great piece of hardware. I do play it a lot. If I'm playing something that's not handheld, I'm most likely playing it on the PS5. I'm happy with it. but I and I also this is where it gets complicated for me where it's like I don't think it's I also don't think it's a mark of success.

certain number of exclusives like i wouldn't be happier with the ps5 if there were like 20 games that were locked to it that i don't care like uh i guess my thing is like because the business model is following that that road yeah it's hard to really gauge the success of it at least on a personal level i totally agree with you so yeah i do i do have that like it's hard

i almost wish astrobot was like separated like have you know maybe wings and nods the series but have it be its own like mario land that way like we could just enjoy it on its own terms and i have to think about how it relates to the current state of the industry it is again we talked about this like there are two decades of game history devoted like dozens if not hundreds of thousands of people trying to make a mario yeah and astrobot is probably the best like version of that yeah

I do think now that I've played it to its end, I haven't 100%ed it, but seeing most of what the game has to offer and enough time has passed that I'm like, this definitely ranks amongst the best Marios. which i was very hesitant to say initially i remember like i asked you that directly yeah i think this is definitely like

I don't know if it's on the same level as Mario 3 or Odyssey, but it's at least on par with 3D World, I would say. It feels like kind of 3D World in Super 3D Land, kind of in the middle there, Mario Wonder. But yeah, I mean, I just... I had to put it this high because it brought me so much joy. I loved every second of it. While I'm playing it, I'm not really having these thoughts. And I had people over it.

It felt as much as the PS5 is a complicated moment in game history. This game did make me happy to have one because I finally felt like.

i actually couldn't have this experience elsewhere yeah i'm sure if i had a fancy enough computer i could but it just feels like oh this is made for it kind of reminds me of what we said about a lot of ds games where it's like there is something special about when games are made with like certain hardware yes you know gimmicks or limitations in mind and it's like the fact that this was made fully with the ps5 controller in mind and it's using every piece of it

it was thrilling and I also think it's a pretty good lesson for Sony where it's like I would wager they did not expect this to be their game of the year you know right like um this in a lot of ways was a bigger success than rebirth was yeah you know and i as much as i'm open to revisiting rebirth it's like not every game needs to be bigger and better and like you know uh

you said this game follows like a very ps1 model and it does and i think that's a testament to like we want a game with like a dedicated mission that accomplishes that successfully yeah and this game set out to like be fun and to be modeled

after like a Crash Bandicoot Spyro-esque game with like a variety of levels and fun design. And that's kind of like, I don't want to say that's all you need is if it's simple because this game is like especially hard to make, which is why I respect it so much. But like...

yeah it doesn't have to be like photorealistic rain or like you know whatever like it's it could just be a fun 10 hour experience yeah yeah i think um there are a lot of critiques you could levy at the game awards but something that you've

said and something that I really agree with is like they're usually pretty good about the game of the year pick in a lot of ways there's only one or two that i raise an eyebrow at yeah everything else i'm like yeah even if that wasn't mine i totally get why that would win right and same here like

I think we talked about this but like when they announced the game of the year nominees my first thought immediately was Astro Bot's definitely gonna win like there's no question that it's gonna be anything other than Astro Bot because it just made sense and it feels kind of safe in ways as you were alluding to earlier but also

I think there's something interesting about that game in particular, winning game of the year, Baldur's Gate winning the year before, like two games that I consider to be rebukes in a lot of ways of what is the industry norm. Great point. Yeah, exactly. And what a lot of these studios. think is the kind of game you need to make.

and how big it needs to be and in what direction it needs to expand. Baldur's Gate is successful because of the depth of what they have there. They have the scope also, which is amazing, but it's really the depth that is the reason that people are there. And similarly, Astro Bot being so paired back, I think, in a lot of ways is inspiring, or at least I hope it's inspiring to the people who are...

sitting in weird boardrooms, you know, receiving pitches from their studio leads and deciding what to greenlight. Because if this game can win game of the year and be the thing that sells, instead of something like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, then like... Maybe it's time to reinvest in smaller things again. Yeah, that's exactly my point. Yeah, we've seen companies expand and contract in ways like that. We've talked a lot about the EA, or what was it, the EA Originals?

oh like when they invested in like mass effect and dead space yeah yeah i forgot the exact name of it but yeah like that era of that era of ea where they were like oh maybe not everything needs to be a sequel to the previous thing that we made maybe we can make something new for once Astro Bot similarly feels like hey if you listen to all the people who played Astro's Playroom and said I would love if

if this team could make a full game, do you think that those people would show up? And the answer is not only yes, but they will champion you for doing it. And this is the kind of game I don't... I don't want to put this pressure on the team, to be clear. But this is the kind of game I feel like you could make every two years. They're going to save America. But like, yeah, I just feel like one of the biggest, and things change.

you know uh like i'm not saying it was inherently better this way but like when we were doing our 2000s retrospective it is really remarkable how like in a four-year span you might have gotten like a breakout game and it's two sequels I'm sure that was a version of crunch that went undocumented. So I'm not like, oh, and that was also a time where like you couldn't update a game. So in a lot of cases, like.

Like a sequel would have just been a patch now. You know, it's like the stuff they added to Astro Bot for free might have been Astro Bot 2 in 2003. Right. You know. Yeah, that's funny. But I do think like.

scaling again uh balatro being one of the nominees as well that i don't think that would have happened like even five years ago like i think that game and astrobot to me getting the attention they did i i hope is it is like a sign of what's to come of like focusing on like you know sustainable development like in a triple a space we can go back to maybe a double a model yeah and also like

seem like hey this game made by one person you know i might actually save more thoughts about bellatro for later so that's all i wonder why yeah i wonder why all right it's on tuesday's list yeah it's on tuesday's list but number three is astrobot for me wow amazing

For me, unfortunately, you're going to have to open that can of worms right now because it's Bolotro. Yeah, Bolotro is my number three. I mean, how do you even speak about Bolotro? I think it's one of those things where... when it was really first of all we need to give a shout out to matt horton once again yeah dude the prophet of the fool yeah for i mean that dude from like the hundred yard line was like I can kick that field goal. And they did it in front of all of us.

was like Balotro is going to be the biggest thing released in 2024 I remember hearing because you know we have our guests record their game of the year pick which you've been hearing throughout this episode yeah and that was like mine's kind of weird it's like a demo for a weird poker game and I was like

matt's trying so hard to be cool and i know you're right you called it matt fucking nailed it from goatee last year yeah shout out to that anyway balatro is um i mean it's one of the best roguelikes ever made it is like the first deck building roguelikes and slay the spire i think to have like oh yeah even a modicum of the juice and maybe as much as if not more in some ways i i think like there's just so many reasons to champion this game like the solo developer who chooses to remain anonymous

you know that's like such a big piece of it for me in some way like it just I resonate with that on a level that I didn't expect to where it's like I totally get why this guy would just want to release this thing and fade into obscurity after watching what happened to like

The Flappy Bird guy, for example. But at the end of the day, I should probably say what Bolotro is. Bolotro is a game. It's like... a poker-based roguelike where you have to make hands to meet certain monetary levels to beat each round, but you have the help of a bunch of jokers

which have different abilities which will increase those hands in different ways so like anytime you have a heart in your hand it will be times two what it would be normally etc etc and then you can modify the cards themselves There are about a million and a half ways to modify all of these things. There are shops after every round where you can be buying and selling and changing all of your loadouts and builds and stuff.

feels like a game that could just get updated endlessly forever oh yeah and I remember when it came out earlier this year, thinking to myself, if this ever comes out on mobile, it'll be probably the best mobile game ever released. And not only did it come out on mobile, but it came out on mobile and then also went straight to Apple Arcade as well. So if you have an Apple Arcade account, it's just like there.

kind of like you with magic arena it's like you just need to acknowledge when you've played like 150 hours of a game you know that is that has no narrative and is just like the same game over and over again um I'm at a point now where I have the gold stake on two different decks. which is like that's amazing i'm like floored by uh having been able to do that but i i have been enjoying watching myself learn it in the way i did with games like gun show and spelunky and everything in between

And I think the thing about Bollatro that really sticks with me is that compared to Slay the Spire, a game that I love dearly, that was in our first game of the year discussion, right? Didn't it come out? It was 2019. It was 2019? Yeah. Either way, like, love...

that game. Similarly, I remember playing dozens and dozens and dozens of hours of Slay the Spire, but I always felt like high level Slay the Spire play was out of my purview like it was a thing I could never really achieve yeah and that doesn't seem to be the case with Politro it's like the more time I devote to it the more ideas I come up with and like sometimes I'll literally be at work and think like what if I did this

and then like see if i can try it sometime the game is also built in a way where like you discover possibilities without trying yeah that will inform future builds yes in a way that i think like say the spire there's this sort of like

skill checkpoint where it's like well now i gotta go on youtube like yes you know there's a certain point where you have to do external research which is fine there's there's a fun to that as well but balatro it's like you can kind of like if you enjoy math enough and you're taking enough mental notes You'll be like, oh, wait a minute. One of the big things for me is I think the first step in Bollatro is divorcing yourself from the rules of poker.

Because initially you're going to be like, okay, I want to try to get a straight or a flush or whatever. And it's like, you can actually build your deck so that a single pair is the most powerful hand in the game. Yeah. You know, like the poker rule is basically just like a starting point.

yeah and it's everything you build on top of yeah it's an on-ramp for some people but like for other people who have no background in poker whatsoever it's like you may actually be at a better starting place because you can build your

entire build around the idea of just high card and you're just playing one card every single time and it's like what if i just played a two every single time and that was my strategy yeah and then you still win the video game right like for example one of my most successful decks was I had the ballot joker that re-triggered the first card and I also had the uh

every face card is re-triggered like the drama masks and then I had all cards are face cards and then I had the smiley face so it was like every card was getting dinged more than once and everything was technically a face card so it was like I just

and what's amazing too is like you feel like you're getting away with murder and then the aunties get so high that's oh wait they expected me to do this yes like that's the beauty of the game yeah it's like oh they want me to break the rules in really interesting ways yeah um I had I had a run where I only had aces of spades in my death by the end of it and like still then the highest

anti i could get to was 12 i think it's like it's amazing what is possible and what still won't get you over the line and how much there is to learn yeah it's amazing i'm i'm really looking forward to an update to that game i think if i'm yeah if i'm remembering correctly local thunk has said that they're just gonna add a bunch more jokers at some point yeah it feels like a binding of Isaac scenario where you can just add more jokers and more terror I mean you get

can't really add more tarot unless you add the minor arcana i guess because it's just the major arcana that would be imagine that update that'd be so sick yeah oh my god that'd be so exciting yeah anyway balachro is my number three um i think it's an all-timer and it's amazing that it's this low on the list yeah it was number one for a long time uh i mean it's like it's

it's tough up up in the top five but uh balatro is still like one of the best games i've ever played probably and will be forever so yeah sometimes i i jumping ahead a bit, but I sometimes think about what is a 2020 retrospective look like?

and in our game of the year episodes i'm like i'm taking notes of a few games that would definitely be on that and balatro is one of them yeah like there's no way that wouldn't be included in a best of 2020s list yeah easy yeah cool that's my number three number three Scout here, your resident whale artist and co-host of Paws and Claws here on the TWG Podcast Network. I was struggling to figure out what to say about my goatee.

But in this case, I think the numbers end up speaking for themselves. See, when Nintendo sent me my play history for 2024, I discovered I played... One game and only one game on my Switch this year, and I played it inexplicably for 174 hours. That game, of course, is Bellatro. Jimbo got me, gamers. He got me, all right? No sweeping narratives for me.

No deeper meaning. No moral of the story. It's just cards. It's cards. It's cards all the way down. And you know what? Sometimes all we need is cards. So thank you, Jimbo, for teaching me that. And thank you so much to our friends here at TWG. for welcoming me and Jill with open arms into the network this year. Cannot wait to keep making things with you in 2025. Let's keep at it. Love you all. Happy New Year.

My number three video game of the year 2024 for the podcast Into the Aether, hosted by Brendan Figley and Stephen Hilger, produced by AJ Flare. Eaters of sandwiches. Is... psychroma uh another next fest game i haven't even heard of this one yeah uh interesting it was um i think day of the devs before summer games fest was when i first saw the trailer for it it is

a side scrolling pixel art narrative adventure game mystery kind of point and clicky kind of game where you play as a character who has lost some part of their memory and is fantazio is it kind of like a fantazio no so it's it's like it's it's a house where where people go kind of when they have like nowhere else to go like this they kind of end up at this house and and they you know like a board there yeah okay yeah um

and weird stuff starts happening uh you start this your character starts having visions uh of like things that they have never experienced and whatever and blah blah blah. The specifics of the plot are wild and it's a mystery game so I'm not going to ruin any of that. But thematically, the game is... about a lot of things.

um but and this is kind of a common through line throughout a lot of my uh a lot of my games because uh i neglected to bring this up a ranger is also about this i think uh about community and how you can help other people within your community and uh psychrome is also also about this and by the end of the game You've kind of like gone through this whole identity journey of like what it means to be a person and like...

Does your past define you? Do your memories define you? Do other people define you? You know, only to come to the conclusion at the end of the game, which I will not spoil. And it's just... it's it's a really really beautiful story um with some extremely extremely unsettling pixel art at times there are like these close-up portraits in certain scenes that are just like,

dizzyingly um like upsetting yes stuff like that yeah brennan just just showed one um and that's that moment is like a flash like that happens in like a second you don't even really get time to register that one fully um

But there's one moment where one character is like, and I'm staying vague, so I'm not considering this a spoiler. One character is licking wallpaper and you get this like fish-eyed portrait of them like close up on their face and they're like one eye is pointed up at the camera and the other it's just like

so disorienting and upsetting to look at. But when, you know, as, as you experienced the game, like that, that kind of imagery really, I think makes a lot of sense in terms of like how it feels to like, think about. your body sometimes and like to be a person, like the kind of horrors that that kind of entails, like even just like this isn't from the game, but this is kind of the idea of just like how weird it is that fingers work.

the way they do and that we have fingers that we can manipulate in certain ways that we don't even really think about you're becoming aware of things that are usually kind of muscle memory yes exactly and and that kind of just inherent kind of awfulness of of of having a body um but you know obviously that is what you know makes us us you're not both tapping your fingers i'm sorry i'm also i'm gonna lick some wallpapers for the thrill

Uh, yeah, I don't want to say too much more. Cause like I said, it's a, it's a, it's a mystery game. And so I don't want to like, who liked this wallpaper. Um, but the, the, it was Charlie bucket. The last thing I will say about this game is that it is an extremely queer video game. There are multiple trans non-binary characters. There is...

It's also in this like cyberpunk future when there's this technology to like experience the memories of another person. And at one point, a character has been like going back and experiencing the memories of like this very bad person. And they eventually go to their spouse. And they're like, I've been doing this.

so much because I think I like I feel more comfortable in the body of a woman and their spouse is like, oh, so you're just trans. Like, thank God I thought you were a fucking psychopath. Like I thought you were inhabiting these person's memories because you liked doing the psycho stuff that this person was doing, but you're just a trans person. That's great. Thank God.

um and the fact that it approaches like you know uh being transgender as as this sort of just like oh okay great fine that's cool yeah um like we can let's let's figure that out and we'll keep moving on like

I just love that. And it means a lot to me as a queer, gender-fluid person. And yeah, Psychroma is my number three video game of the year. Wow. That's awesome. Yeah, I think it's cool to have a game that you said is like... experimenting with a bit of body horror but is also showing like the power of like if if one is comfortable in their body the sort of peace that that can provide yes yeah and it's and it's it also it

And it talks about it from so many different lenses too. It's like being comfortable in your body, but also acknowledging that on some levels, you are your body, yes. But on other levels, you are just... your brain or your soul or whatever inside thing you know that is you the body is like whatever you're comfortable in like you said it's just like the body is whatever like as long as you are acting as your true self that is what really matters

Wow. The name once more? Sychroma. Sychroma. Sounds awesome. PSY. PSY. yeah roma i have to think about it five whole dollars that video game is it only five dollars it's five bucks hell yeah yeah uh highly recommend yeah you can buy that game like a dozen times or a new copy of Astro Bot. Uh, yeah. You've given me a lot of games that I need to play, AJ. They're short. They're all really short. We can do another bonus of just me and Brandon catching up.

I mean, honestly, like most many of these games are also dot zip episodes. So I feel kind of weird double dipping, but it's your experience. We're here to celebrate our favorite games. Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, this episode are only games that Steven and I have brought to our podcast. That is also factual. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. All right. Fair enough.

Yeah, don't feel bad about that at all, honestly. I think there's only one game that'll come up in honorable mentions that I didn't bring up on the show, actually. I'm excited to hear what it is. It's Minesweeper. It's Minesweeper, yeah. Not to pull the conversation back to where we already were, but number two for me is Balotro. Same. Hell yeah. Wow. Wow. We kind of covered most of the reasons why already, but I think it's.

For me, a lot of the deck builders that I really like, thinking of Slay the Spire, arguably Magic.

uh monster train i really like like these games all have a lot of flavor that kind of like bring you in and then the mechanics keep you there and it's kind of hard to talk about baladro like it doesn't sound exciting to be like it's poker you know like i feel like it's hard to really pitch like you kind of have to play it like because the flavor is just the variety of jokers and the art for the jokers like a joker can just be like a ballot or like

Yeah. Like one of them is like Dusk Joker and it's like a sunrise. It's a beautiful. Yeah. Just like some guy's business card. Yeah. Yeah. Right. The background is this like ever flowing. I was talking off mic. It reminds me of like Earthbound Battles.

psychedelic thing and it's just one kind of hypnotic song the whole time yeah but it just it feels it really does feel like we talked about how dragon quest 3 is like the sort of main essentials of both dragon quest and kind of rpgs in general and balatro sort of feels like just a mechanic first deck builder yeah with just enough flavor that it's not super dry like there's there's enough kind of surrealness with the tarot cards and the planet cards and the music but

it really is just like how weird can math get you know that's kind of it's like here's the math that's already beneath so many other deck building roguelikes that you play yes exactly just kind of exposed and underneath you know the like monster train of it all was actually this like amorphous weird thing it's like how that game you've brought up many times dungeon encounters is just like a spreadsheet and battles like balatro feels similar to me yeah but it works so well and i mean i

i wasn't sure like this doesn't really feel like a steven game but it it really worked for me and it's a game that i love playing before bed on steam deck uh which you know is is a is becoming my like go-to place in many ways for games it might just be like and everything and everything is a go before bed steam deck game but yeah ball show is incredible and i think there's a reason why it's just I mean, this is a game that will be on everyone's list.

you know it just kind of has universal appeal in that way yeah yeah i um i got this game on switch when it came out and i played a bunch of it and i was like okay i feel satisfied and then i realized the touch controls work on switch yeah i went oh no and

that was all I played for a solid two weeks. Like anytime I had any sort of downtime, like waiting for my computer to boot up i'll play some ballatro yeah waiting for toast to toast in the morning i'll play some ballatro i was literally carrying around my switch without the joy cons in my pocket Just like I love that at any time ready to just break out Ballotro.

Here's a weird question for you. Sorry to derail. Do you find yourself in those moments like where you have free time and then you pick up? the game again do you continue the game that you were already playing or do you start from the beginning i continue the game i was playing it's interesting i find that like if i am going to the bathroom for example and i'm like i'm gonna play ball of trail on my phone while i'm sitting on the toilet

abandon whatever run i'm in the middle of and start again and then the next time i pick up the game i will abandon whatever that run was then i'll start i also have trouble starting mid-run yeah yeah really yeah i just forget where the momentum was yeah it's about momentum i think

um i find that with a lot of roguelikes where like if i can put them down the middle of a run it just means i should abandon that run yeah and a run is fast enough it doesn't feel like unless you're doing like endless mode or something yeah i feel like the way that I play this game and we talked a little bit about this in our discord about how like I'm not

i i am not really concerned with like getting to higher stakes really like i've gotten to the second stake or green i don't remember what it is uh it's green yeah yeah on like a couple of decks i'm like that's cool and i've i've unlocked you know

mostly all of them except the ones that you need to beat the stakes to unlock. And I actually have more fun with the challenges than I do actually trying to like get beat the higher stakes and stuff. But anyway, so all that to say, like the way that I play this game is like... you were talking about with slay the spire like at a certain point you have to like like look up strats to like play the meta or whatever um and like i just

And this is partly why deck building roguelikes never really clicked for me is because I'm not willing to put in that effort. And so with Ballotro, how that manifests is like... either i'll start off deciding like i'm gonna make this one a two-pair run or i'll just wait until i get a joker early on that's like kind of shapes it i'm like this is i'm you know i i build it around hands more so than i build it around like

other types of specific strategies so I don't I don't feel like the momentum thing really yeah bugs me that much usually because I can usually and like i said like i've never let a run sit for like more than a day usually you know like so i come back to it relatively quickly and i look at it i'm like oh okay this is my pairs one and i'll just play a pair you know and i'm like okay yeah and i and and then if i lose because i forget what my actual strategy was

You know, whatever. I'll just start a new one. But yeah, that is an interesting question. I actually abandoned my first run the other day because it had been a very long time. And I'm like, I don't know what's going on. I think it was because I was checking what stake I was on. So I had to go back to the menu of like, what decks do I have?

my uh my first kind of mission i gave myself was i want to unlock all the decks yeah yeah so i have all the deck like the first batch of decks you get by beating a run with a certain deck yes and the rest are all the stakes like the stakes are kind of like

like the heat in Hades where like the first stake is that small blinds don't give you money. And then the second stake I think is just the antis are the, the number you have to hit is higher overall. I just beat that one's pretty tough to beat. Like that's kind of the, the wall in some ways at least.

steak is uh some jokers you can't get rid of um i find all that to be really interesting so i think that kind of just shapes like things that maybe take for granted or maybe even mechanics that i haven't really fully thought of yeah i suddenly have to be mindful of like yeah i think skipping blinds is is sort of an early thing where it's like why would i do that right you know but then you say oh skipping this blind gives you a free pack and it's like well if i'm doing a run on a certain stake

Like if I'm doing it higher than the first day, I'm not going to get any money from the small blinds. It's pretty much always worth skipping that one. Right. You know, like I've gone to four shops and I haven't gotten any jokers above common in any of them. But here, if I skip this blind, I can get a rare joker.

definitely in the shop and it's going to be free like that's a no-brainer also speaking of flavor it's fun to see a lot of the collaborations balachro has been doing like there are 1000 times resist cards in Molotov which is hilarious so good yeah at first there was like Witcher ones and a few other games like Stardew Valley and Doom it's cool to see like I

I'm a little bit exhausted at like IP crossover, but I love when it's like at this level. Yeah. Seeing like Balotro shout out 1000 times this and like that rules. Yeah. Yeah. Love that. Yeah. I like that they used Ben star for the last. yeah that was amazing that was wild I didn't know that until somebody in the discord shouted out like I watched that whole that was you it was me yeah I watched that whole trailer and I was like I okay

yeah that was interesting and then you're like that's ben star i was like oh yeah i was like this guy seems weirdly familiar for some reason yeah it's like is that i looked up final fantasy ben because i knew his first name was ben but i couldn't remember what his last name was yeah yeah great performance by the way great performance yeah shout out My number two game of the year for 2024 is UFO 50. Oh, yeah. I should preface this by saying I have a review of this on my channel, Wavelengths.

where I really tried to encapsulate how I feel about this thing in 30 minutes or less. And it's still hard to really overstate how powerful UFO 50 is, I think, as an idea.

So taking a step back, I don't think we've mentioned this, but it is like... just once again a super group of a bunch of incredible developers you have Derek Yu the creator of Spelunky you have the creator of Downwell you have a bunch of like great board game designers you have great musicians and like just like sprite artists and stuff all coming together And over the course of literally a decade being like, we are going to create.

50 video games all in one package and you know they say this in the marketing I said this a million times we've all said this on the show before but like it is 50 full games it is not micro games it is not a WarioWare style thing it is like 50 full games that could have hypothetically been created in the NES era. It's almost hard to unpack how big of a project that is and how difficult it is and how amazing it is that they pulled it off literally at all, much less on the level that they have.

going down the many layers of the rabbit hole of what makes UFO 50 special. It's like... imagine if the people who got together and made the pico 8 system also made all of the games that exist on pico 8 right This is a group of people who invented a new system that could have existed in the late 80s into like the early to late 80s.

and then made all of the games that would have existed for that by one fake company that they also invented, which is made up of individual fake people who all have their own ideas about game design. And you get to watch over the course of the 50 games.

not only put their own stamp on the different games that they made, but what happens when these two people collaborate? What happens when this guy who has really strange ideas about how games should control because he's not very into the idea of like D-pads and A and B? meets up with this other person who just makes like arcade run and gun shooters. like what game does that produce yeah like meta kind of high level stuff i think is amazing and it's incredible that they managed to make it work

But then you drill down into each game in particular and just like take it on its own merit. And like you said it and I've said it before as well, but like Party House by itself would have been in the top five of my game of the year list, hands down. And it makes... as you said, placing this in the top 10, a really difficult prospect. Because when you have a game as good as Party House, and you're like, that is just one of the 50 things in this unit.

where does that leave you when you need to also include the other 49? And then it creates a strange calculus in your head where you're like, well, I really like 10 of these. I kind of like 10 of these. And, you know, I don't know, the other 30 are like, I could take or leave or whatever. Where does that leave you? But at the end of the day, the experience I had with UFO 50 just feels unlike anything I've experienced before, except for the direct analogs to doing this.

with other consoles as we have in the past yeah as we've done with the Game Boy Advance and the DS and the 3DS and the GameCube and the Dreamcast and upcoming the PSP like That is an experience that I know well, and I've never seen a game even think to capture that, much less do it on this level. I think like...

Just the idea of we're going to make all of these games and they could have existed in the era, but also inspiration points from now are bleeding backwards into the game design as well. They're like... obviously they're you know as we mentioned with party down like that is the second best deck building roguelike of the year outside of balatro i would say party house yeah oh yeah party house

Party Down is a great show. Yeah, Party Down. We are having fun. Yeah. Yeah, is the answer. Yeah. Yeah, I...

Again, I talked about this a lot on Wavelengths. We've talked about this a lot on the show. I think that this game is just kind of a masterwork, and it's... one of those things where i'm just going to be happy that it is in this spot oh yeah five years from now and i'm looking back i would guarantee this will come up again on the show again as we continue digging into each of these games there's still so much i haven't seen yeah you know and like

we always love revisiting stuff i want to go back to barbuda or like the weird underwater rpg and be like is there anything here for me or is it just nothing you know yeah like um you mentioned it earlier but like grimstone for example yeah you know that's like again like a 30 hour rpg that's very much in the vein of dragon quest 3 specifically oh yeah but set in like uh like texas in hell yeah wild west um it's an amazing game like it is one of the great like

ever made yeah and it's in this 2024 video game it has it has all these ideas about like how to replay things and how you're supposed to how combat's supposed to work and like it spends a lot of time like fucking with your preconceptions of how you're supposed to play these games as well it's able to subvert them as well as like

kind of be an homage and that again that's just one thing night manor an incredible point and click horror game that i feel like if was released separately would have been on your list yeah

time and time again you just run into these things and i imagine as you said like there will be times where i will revisit ufo 50 and be like oh wow maybe this game really is clicking with me you know a game like a tactics that didn't really click with me at first like maybe i'll get back to a tactics and like end up loving it you know

um i think uh i think it's amazing that this thing exists i hope over time people like give it its due i think the biggest thing for ufo 50 if i really were to take a step back and just think about like industry-wide and kind of the future i think when they port this to anything that's not pc it's going to blow up yeah yeah i mean it's already like i've seen this in a lot of other like publications lists as well i think it's kind of like

it feels kind of made for a game critic in a lot of ways where it's like again it's gamifying criticism in some ways but also for other developers that was kind of my first thought was this feels like it's I don't know if that's what they necessarily wanted to limit the audience to, but I feel like... Someone who spends a lot of time analyzing games or maybe it's their job to write critically about games or make scams will eat this the fuck up.

you know because it feels like a shared language we all secretly have you know yeah i think i think one of the one of the target audiences that i don't think it's hit yet and i think it will when it's able to hit a larger audience is streamers also oh yeah i think the amount of bandwidth that streamers will be able to pull out of this game. It's going to be really big. The only one who I've really seen capitalize on is Northern Lion, who I've been watching.

since he played the first Dark Souls, whenever that was. 2011. Yeah, like a long time ago. But like, he's the only streamer that I saw like really take UFO 50 and be like, I'm going to every single day stream a new game from UFO 50. And that experience of watching somebody else.

go through it i think was exhilarating and knowing that eventually when this is on like switch for example yeah a lot of other streamers will then have the ability to go through that day by day again and be like the next 50 days of my content calendar are set already because i got ufo 50 and my audience is going to love it because these games rule is going to be really exciting oh yeah it's funny i think

I think Dunkey's video is also a good like here's like kind of what your experience will probably be like where he starts with Barbuda and he's just like what the fuck yeah like a classic Dunkey reaction to a very strange game and then he gets into I think it's Ninpec uh and he's like and then he says something he's like oh these are like real games all he's like why is this game so fully fleshed out yeah yeah we're all like

the the days in which a game could say 50 games in one and actually mean it right it's like maybe the only game that sort of did that was like we sports and that was four and two of them were good yeah uh one two and a half um but yeah no ufo 50 is a huge accomplishment to say the least yeah yeah i'm excited to see the future of ufo 50 as both people figure out more stuff that is still tucked away in that thing and also

when it launches wider i think it's like a second life on other consoles i'd love to do yeah we can either pick away at or maybe do an episode about it one day once we're like further in yeah a lot of fun if we didn't already pick the psp we could have just said ufo 50 damn that's that's what it would be like an almost equal amount of prep you know yeah

yeah uh the eggplant pod is doing yeah a retrospective for the next year right year of ufo 50 yeah every week they're talking about the secret life of games uh great great great podcast that started off just as a spelunky show it was literally called the spelunky show like and now it's called Eggplant the Secret Life of Games but it's a bunch of great game developers who every week now until they're done have been going through each game in UFO 50 day by day

or sorry week by week and bringing on other game developers to dive deep into like one game in particular every once in a while bringing in the developer of that game from UFO 50 also which is I think the first time they're kind of like breaking the facade of

We just found this in a containment unit in a storage unit somewhere. Isn't this fun? Yeah. Which is great. That was like a thought I had when I first, obviously they didn't go in this direction other than maybe a night manner, but I'm like, there's like a creepy pasta version of this, you know? Totally.

i was prepared for there to be more of like a strange like kind of meta narrative happening but it really is just that kind of fictional history yeah it's kind of like um what you're talking about feels like hypnospace outlaw yeah yeah like that almost kind of has a similar edge to it but like instead of browsing the web you were playing games oh this is made by wd gaster oh yeah right you got that jesus uh that's my number two it's ufo 50 ufo 50 hell yeah

Takes us to number one. Oh, man. All right. Well, here we are. Number one. My game of the year is, of course, Metaphor Re-Fantasio. Re-Fantasio. It's a Re-Fantasio. It's a Balatro. Yeah. i mean so i have finished this game when i first got persona 5 i i didn't mention this i think i've mentioned it before but i beat that game in like a frightening amount of time and that's a long game i beat persona 5 in like two weeks i just could not

I remember nights where it would be like 6 a.m. and I was still playing. I was like, I don't care. I just want to keep playing. Metaphor, I had a healthier pace with.

again to David's point like I think it's paced out better like I felt like I kind of did like a dungeon every kind of week or so but I mean yeah I just i really think this is at least my favorite atlas game uh which is saying quite a bit wow yeah what i said that's a big thing to say yeah no i i just i mean i think persona 3 probably like cuts deeper into the soul for me like i think that game like makes me cry and uh kind of makes i think it's a very profound experience like it's

got something to say about life and death which is hard to do without being like real trite but metaphor just like pound for pound I feel like the combat I think is better than ever Like, it's very much a fusion of Persona and SMT combat. But I think the archetype system, like, I still, again, hundreds of hours later, I couldn't confidently tell you how Persona fusion works. like I just don't read I kind of get like

Like, okay, these make a more powerful one. You want moves to carry over, but it... feels a little bit like how i played the trumpet in middle school whereas i know like a few notes but i'm just gonna kind of go in the background and hope it works and pretend to be playing but not actually play the notes sometimes i wanted to play drums and they said you could play the tuba i'm like please don't give the fat kid a tuba like i don't want

to do this for my middle school career yeah um like my one year playing trombone yeah and everyone was like it sounds like farts and then i dropped out of band then i played guitar and thought i was cool um but anyway like metaphor the archetype system is just way easier i feel like it's giving you the same level of maybe not the same full level of control but like the level of control most people will want we're like

okay I want this character to play this role on the team and I know exactly what that role is given like the names of archetypes are like you know Thief night. They're all very to the point. and uh you can carry over moves from other archetypes so like but i think the limit is four so it's kind of like okay i want them to be this archetype but i want them to have these moves and it's like you can kind of see a very visible path

for that character and the fact that you can kind of make anyone any archetype you want i just think leads to a lot of really cool customization and kind of the opposite of persona 3 where like those early versions of that game you know you could only control the protagonist

metaphor is kind of really making the point like this is an ensemble everyone here could be the main character which is kind of funny like stroll your first friend that dude thinks he's the main character because there's so many

the main character isn't silent but doesn't speak up quite as much but like there are so many moments like in any other game it would be the protagonist monologue but it's stroll being like you don't know you know it's like strolls really picking up the mantle um but like

so combat I think is great I think that the like classic sort of weakness like in in smt and persona the combat is usually revolving around like if you use a move the enemy is weak to kind of like pokemon with elemental weaknesses you get to go again or you get extra turns

the same thing a metaphor but there are also other moves that will just give you extra turns and so there's like a few more systems at play where one of the most busted archetypes in the game is my guy heismay's final archetype where if someone misses him they lose their entire turn no matter how many like rounds they have uh that

saved my ass in the final battle which is very difficult but there's just stuff like that where you can kind of like almost see other strategies that exist around the sort of classic like use what they're weak to get more turns not to mention like the tanking classes that like attract

A character like Heismay, who has really high agility, he can avoid attacks very easily, but has fairly low defense. But you might still want to give him a knight move so he can draw enemy attention, and then they just all myth. which will deplete their turn faster so do i want to invest in like hulkenberg who can cast spells that raise the whole party's defense or do I want a character that can't get hit so they just lose their turns entirely

So I just found that to be like inescapable. Like I just love that stuff. Like I love that level of customization. And I also love this game's kind of classic approach to dungeon crawling. Like I think that the... all the main story dungeons are really interesting and have a cool flip to them. And then the sort of mini dungeons that are tied to the bounties all feel like really fun to explore and really, you know, just like kind of has that.

classic fantasy feel to it um but i liked how like certain dungeons in the main story if there's one dungeon that's essentially a heist where they're like okay we need to beat this boss in three moves or less so suddenly it's less about having like the most powerful moves and more how efficient can i be in this fight and the game also kind of lets you swap archetypes fairly freely so that's my one thing with these types of games that they customize characters

is like i don't want to feel like i'm secretly building them wrong this whole time and then finding that out in like hour 80 you know so having the ability to just experiment and not be punished for it I think it's great so mechanically it's remarkable I think you know we touched on the story being effective I think it does really stick the landing I would say that like I was most invested.

somewhere in the middle um i think it kind of peaks around the fourth dungeon which introduces like it's probably the biggest like reveal of the story and also like it's kind of where all the plot lines meet

But, you know, I think a lot of people have talked about how this game coming out during an election year is kind of wild. And also, you know, being about an election in a lot of ways. The framing device of the story is that the king dies and casts this spell where like the next... king is literally the person who most people believe in

So the game is framed like a road trip where you and your friends are basically helping people in efforts to climbing that rank. But what's interesting is that it doesn't begin just being like, I want to be king. You're actually initially advocating for someone else. And then eventually you're kind of operating undercover. So it kind of becomes like we have to do this thing and this thing to end up doing this kind of end result. But.

But again, littered in that sort of high stakes, high fantasy story are all these moments of just cooking with your friends and hanging out. And this is maybe the most even cast. I think even in Persona 3, there are a couple characters that I just don't really vibe with. Like pretty much every Persona game has a couple characters. I'm like, whatever. Everyone a metaphor I would die for. Like every single character in that party is so good. And.

the way they join the party to like every awakening scene where they like get the power of the archetype i think is remarkable and you know the story the the political message is essentially kind of about you know like action is worth more than ideas.

like actually meeting people face to face and helping them is more effective than sort of like broad sweeping things which kind of feels like a deconstruction of the SMT alignments where it's always like do you want to destroy the world or like give it to weird cop angels yeah it's a weirdly similar thing here

But I think what's even more powerful than maybe the political message is sort of just the power of fiction itself. You know, the game is about, it opens with this voice being like, to you, this is a work of fiction. Do you think fantasy has no power?

what I say a similar line in the script I wrote for my video about this game but like we've talked about how when you finish persona it feels like you have this part of you missing like you miss your friends and you want to go back to that world and metaphor ends in a way that kind of asks you to keep the game with you

And it does really feel continuous in that way. I feel like I'm never really going to stop thinking about this world and this cast and hope that a story like this can create some kind of positive difference you know i think like stories like this in general when we go back and re-watch lord of the rings

There's a part of us that's like, you know, there's a monologue Sam has at the end of Two Towers about like the stories that really matter and how, you know, when we hear these grand tales, it's like, was there ever a moment where those characters felt truly hopeless? and how it's in those moments where we feel hopeless.

where you know our actions are what create the stories that really matter you know and again it goes back to not giving up the power of friendship and all that but i think when a game like this can kind of at least nod to real world issues and have the you know yes this story applies to an election year. But I think that this applies to a lot of periods in history. Yeah. And I just it just really worked for me and it really connected with me. And I think it gave me.

Similar to how I finished Persona 3 right after I lost a close friend, playing this game in the thick of where our country is currently at. it was comforting you know it was comforting to have a game simultaneously be an escape but also acknowledge what's happening and also kind of remind us that like fantasy isn't just an escape it isn't just

a cozy, you know, game with hobbits where you can hide from the world. That's fine. There's a place for that. But I think just like sci-fi and horror can comment on where we're at and what we can do about it, so too can fantasy.

um and so i just i found that to be really moving and really powerful and uh i loved every minute of it i'm already going to play new game plus which is insane it's a 90 hour game that's my game of the year baby they have new game plus in that thing oh yeah yeah and there's there's secret bosses that are only in new game plus So I'm in. Really? Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah.

so uh so i have to finish it and then play it again okay if you want to re metaphor re fantasia oh that's why it's called re fantasia um no that was that was all really well said um thanks that game fucking rocks. Just to take it down a peg. No, that... It's, um... It's incredibly moving. And I remember even in our first episode talking about it when you and I were really early on, it was like, they are pulling on some threads.

that are some, they're leading to some much bigger threads than I maybe am comfortable with this team tackling. And then it was like 10 hours later, it was like, they are still handling this very well. Then 10 hours later, it was like, oh.

I think they might really understand the things that they're bringing. I've seen some discourse about like where the game and like, not like super controversial, but I've seen some people think like this worked maybe less successfully for other people. And that's totally fine. I kind of took. the sort of like final statement as metaphor you know I took it like it's not yeah thank you thank you um

But like, you know, I think when you tackle issues this sensitive, there's of course, like, I think some of the smaller stories are more successful than others. I think where the game succeeds the most is like, there are two. There are brothers that just steal the show. Like everything about those two is masterfully done. You can make a game that's just their story and it would still be my game of the year. And I think like.

i think because like the the central villain of the game is one of the candidates in the lead who has a very like you know burn it all down message to his political platform and i think the fact of the game kind of shows his followers and it's like well what led to this person wanting that to be their only hope at a future yeah um i found that to be really effective because i think there was an easier script where it just kind of made them all the bad guys right now and i think

showing why people are so deeply unhappy with the entire system of this game i think is is a more powerful way to tell that story yeah and and also i mean it's louise is a great villain i think like They don't redeem him or condone him at all, but I think they do a good job showing why he thinks of the world the way he does. Yeah, where does a person like that come from? Yeah, exactly. Whereas I think a lot of villains and persona can be a little bit... I actually like that Team Rocket in 3.

I've said this on our Patreon episode with Callie and Alana about Persona 3, 4, and 5, but Persona 3 is the only one to me that gets away with fighting God at the end. you know like four four is like why am i fighting god in four uh and you know five i think is a little bit like ironically anticlimactic with it but it works in three thematically and yeah metaphor i think having that guy be the villain the whole time and like

only kind of get more interesting because of that as it goes on. Yeah, I think it's just really well done. That's why I think it's the best game they've made because everything about it works. Yeah. There isn't like a weak chapter. There isn't a weak character. I just had the best time the whole, the whole game. Yeah. Wow. So it's my, it's my goatee. Wow. Wow.

I can't wait for you to play it. Yeah, I want to play it. I think it's a good one to start with. I think it's actually, like, I would have said Persona 5, but I actually think metaphor is a better entry point, depending on one's taste. I think it really just depends on, like... Like if you're more intrigued by the high fantasy or by this sort of coming of age narrative of five. Yeah, I think probably it'll be metaphor. Yeah. Hearing you say that it.

is your favorite atlas game really kind of sent it over the edge i'm glad i'm glad you trust me that's very funny yeah no i mean for atlas games who else would we trust i don't listen to anybody else I'm excited for you to get further in, Brendan. Me too.

I don't know, like knowing how passionate you are about your top five, I don't know if it would have breached that, but I think... you'll i think you'll only like it more and more as it goes on honestly yeah yeah again i mean what a what a ridiculous year uh oh yeah to be competing with but um

and a really great year for atlas like there i actually had to hold back i mean unicorn overlord personality reload and metaphor are all technically atlas games right there was another one i could have put on my list that i didn't just because i was like enough

yeah and i remember us having this conversation we were like oh man if we even widen that out to sega yeah then it's like then you get to include like a dragon infinite wealth in there also and and uh sonic uh the shadow game yeah yeah which uh like

critically beloved that thing is like showing up on a lot of Game of the Year lists. Yeah. But anyway... uh all right here it goes my number one game of the year unsurprisingly persona 3 reload yes yay you're officially a persona fan i'm officially a persona fan yeah i've

We've talked about this a lot. My history with this franchise is like just... trying over and over again basically going all the way back to the website that you and I used to write for where I basically got peer pressured into buying a PlayStation Vita which thank God I did because like that is one of the most formative game consoles soul i've ever owned yeah um So shout out to the PlayStation Vita. But I got that in Persona 4 Golden just based on the recommendations of everyone on staff.

Everyone was so stoked about that thing. So I was like, okay, cool. Give it a shot. this is an era where I did not play RPGs. I did not consider myself to be an RPG fan. I like avoided turn-based combat, like the plague, unless it was Pokemon. I think I showed you like awakening when I visit you, when you're working at Starbucks, you're like, I don't want to talk about that. Get that shit away.

yeah well we were playing pokemon x at the time oh yeah which was a lot of fun the weird irony of that like that disconnected my brain that like pokemon wasn't turn-based combat for some reason i don't know what was up with that but anyway you know i tried playing persona 4 uh golden in that time and ended up putting still like

14 or 15 hours in because I think if I recall correctly I was listening to the besties at the time and I remember Griffin McElroy specifically he was really into that game yeah and that was the first time on that show that they had the it gets good 40 hours in you know and and I just remember telling myself like I will

until these guys tell me that it gets good and then i did and i got to that point i was like it's getting good and then i put it down and never played it again which is so funny and then you know obviously we started doing the show and five happened and a bunch of other people that i knew uh were also playing five so i started playing

once again got pretty far in and then put it down and then three has kind of always been lingering especially knowing you you've always been like three is the one you got to get to eventually like five is great four is great three is the one that like you will probably connect with the most yeah and you're not the only person who told me that like

Like, you know, Callie, who was on that episode with you and Alana, has been telling me that for years. Pablo has been telling me that for years. Like, so many people in my life have been like, you are going to love Persona 3. I once said that 3, 4, or 5, the one you'll like the most depends on where you ate lunch in high school. So I said...

Four you like the most if you ate lunch at the loudest table. Five you like the most if you left school with your friend who had a car and got lunch like in town. and three like the most if you ate lunch on the steps with like the other kind of kids and bands right and that was you that was that was me yeah like historically i uh started a weird tradition in our high school where there was one stairwell by the art wing yes

we would send invites to people yeah you could come eat with us in the stairwell that is very persona three yeah weird texts like yeah like hey i want to eat lunch with you on the steps yeah yeah wow um But anyway, all of that to say, the lead up...

to this game coming out was like i really want to play persona 3 but the conversation we've had a million times about it on the show is like there's no definitive way to play it yeah and it was like okay well i dipped into portable a little bit i bought a copy of fez for ps2 and tried playing that a little bit she's like I don't know if these are really clicking with me and then of course they announced reload and I was like okay cool just wait for that yeah play that

no matter what it is and you've already gone through some of the caveats with it you know no female protagonist which is a huge bummer yeah just a couple things that's the biggest one like everything else is kind of fine and just sort of by virtue of making a remake yeah that's the only decision that's like baffling right yeah it's bizarre yeah and they should have done it and it's it's stupid it's literally stupid that they yeah right

so quickly uh the same way you have always talked about playing persona it was the first time where it was like i sat down and i just clicked with it so immediately um and and a lot of that and i i have written a full review of this and i should probably mention i meant to mention this when i was talking about ufo 50 but i'm doing a video for wavelengths.

That is my top 50 games in honor of UFO 50 of the year. Oh, cool. And in the script for the Persona 3 bit, whether that video is out now by the time this episode is out or not, you will hear it in that bit. But the thing that really clicked with me about Persona 3 immediately outside of just the stairwell comparison is like this.

This kid is a spitting image of me in exactly the year that this game takes place. Working at the cafe, the same hairstyle to a large degree. That's the weird thing. These are our peers. This is when we went to high school. Yeah, but I just... such a deep level so quickly that I like...

it was it was an uncanny feeling that was like okay whatever happens to this person is a thing that is also happening to me because i was just seeing myself more clearly in the in the reflection of this tv screen than ever before and by the time the game wrapped

game like yeah I literally like by the time the credits rolled I walked away from it being like I am a different person than before I started playing persona 3 I think a lot of the themes that they tackle you've already mentioned the stuff about death but also like the large scale looming threat in the world is the idea of apathy syndrome, which is like more and more people around the world are just feeling like lethargic about the way society is built.

you know and you can you can find a direct line between that and like what they started to explore in metaphor right like there's such a direct line between what they were thinking about with persona 3 and what has manifested in metaphor even going so far as like the protagonist looking very similar and even the two main friends like stroll looks kind of like the persona four lead yeah and you know uh hulkenberg has the red of five in her hair but um i i just

I just found it so moving to find this like group of weird outcasts coming together to try and overcome what. feels like an end of the world scenario but in actuality is all just a metaphor for like it's kind of like a it's kind of like a fantasio for for like the things that people normally experience whether at that age in high school or or later um ideas like apathy and depression and

dealing with substance abuse and everything under the sun that can befall you. The game largely... as you said kind of has an answer for it yeah the game has on a on a larger scale and and this goes all the way back to the conversation we had at the beginning of this episode but like it tackles the most core ideas and emotions that humankind can experience.

in a way that feels deft and feels wise. It knows what you should walk away feeling. And it's honestly made me not only reflect on that portion of my life, where I've talked very openly about that era being one where I had undiagnosed... major depressive disorder long before I even like had the opportunity to go see a therapist and talk to anyone about it but like

reflecting on that time through the lens of this video game was extremely helpful i'm very grateful to be able to talk to my therapist now about what it's like to play persona 3 yeah to in a way like retroactively go to therapy in high school um but But outside of that, it has started to allow me to inform my future in a way. And so much of that is due to the calendar system. So much of that is due to the back and forth between what the calendar system means in Persona 3 that has almost...

like not to put them down too much but it has become trivialized in four and five yeah in a way that like I will play those games but almost makes me want to play them less because I know that the calendar system is just there because it was successful in Persona 3 without like the reason for it it's similar to like a ranger's character moving through the world and destroying everything as she's doing it like that

that is how intrinsically tied the themes of Persona 3 are to having a calendar in there. And it's made me as a person now with like extremely limited time. start to think very specifically about where I'm devoting that time and like how much joy it's bringing me in my own life. That's the thing. I think that without spoiling, there's a sequence.

in every version of Persona 3 I don't know if it's in Reload I imagine it is because it's pretty faithful despite some new additions but like there's a sequence near the end where you just have to do your schedule

but with no like s-links no social interaction you're basically just a zombie it's so effective it's just so depressing to like yeah go through the motions of the day and have none of those and those are moments you take for granted as a player and also the moments you take for granted like this

thing we're sharing right now is so special yeah and like feels just like a lived moment now but it's like we're going to reflect on this recording but this is so much fun to do it's so fun to do this show yeah you know and it's like these when you break it up day by day it feels so inconsequential but it's like persona three ends reminding like hey that bookstore couple you like chatted with a few days like you were a huge part of their life

even in that small moment you shared. Right. Yeah. And I think that's where you're kind of getting at when you're getting into the calendar system of like your own life. And that's something that I find very therapeutic, even though the calendar system maybe makes less thematic sense in four and five. I just think the act of playing these games can kind of be a helpful step back into your own routine where it's like,

it kind of helps everything feel more manageable. Even if there is this cataclysmic thing on the horizon, you can break it up into pieces you can do every day. Yeah. I think when sitting down and trying to decide what my number one was, you know persona 3 reload as soon as i finished it hit the number one spot and then i spent some time kind of waffling on like oh should it be balatro should it be ufo 50 those two games in particular kind of like

flipped in and out but it obviously has to be persona 3 reload because you know even though it is technically a remake of a game that came out you know whenever it did it just it is a game that will stick with me and does and I do think about like almost every single day still just waking up and considering what am I doing today and how much joy is it bringing me and who am I seeing in my life that's important to me and how am I helping them and how am I making their day and like

What is my community like and how do I attach myself to that in a way that feels stronger? And thinking about things like the Discord that we set up for this show and that has now grown into a much bigger space that brings a lot of people joy. Things like that are the things that...

should and do drive me. And the more distractions I find away from that, I think are things that persona three has kind of like put a magnifying glass on and is like why why the fuck are you focused on this like this doesn't matter in the grand scheme of your own life and the things that you in some ways should or can be doing and a story that powerful needs

to be number one for me definitely no matter no matter what remake or not you know like last year it was Resident Evil 4 because that was a transformative remake you know that was a transformatively different game than the original resident evil 4 despite following the same plot beats like it felt like a new thing realistically and as evidenced by our games of the decade episode persona 3 reload is like kind of not that but just

and say that the most profound... experience that i had this year experiencing media or even just like doing anything was playing persona 3 reload definitely no that warms my heart i'm so happy it landed so strongly for you yeah who's your favorite cease member The dog. Yeah. Coromaro. Coromaro is the best. It's a good choice.

so i know this is like your parents pulling you in both directions i do think the persona 3 reload is like actually the best atlas game to start with this i mean i'm seeing like this is a very nice moment we're having and i'm like it's gonna make the top five fucking impossible yeah it's gonna be brutal uh i actually had a very funny vision my friend

very many years ago bought me Persona 4 Golden on Steam and I was just like, what if I said, yeah, I'll play Metaphor and just played 4 instead. I think you would enjoy all of them. I don't think you would regret starting one.

thematically and stuff I think I would be into it I would just I just have to get over the hump of like it's so long and like this is the kind of game that i don't really play often segmented like i think if you break it up like i'm just gonna do this dungeon this month yeah i don't they don't feel long in the way like i

Trails from Zero was my game of the other year of the year. But the Trails games feel much longer to me because they're like... continuous stories whereas like the the something about life sim games time just melts like fields of mystery uh stardew valley animal crossing like even if you are like a very i don't say this to gatekeep if you are a very casual gamer you have 400 hours at least in animal crossing new horizons partially because of the pandemic but you like that game just

time just passes differently yeah and the same thing is true at least for me with the persona games where like i don't I wouldn't worry about that going in. And if it's not for you, it's not for you. It is no pressure. But yeah, you can break them up into dungeons, I think, pretty easily. And then that becomes like a little 10 hour journey that you can break up over the course of the year. Yeah. I like thinking about it like that. Yeah.

My number one game of the year. More like my number 1000 game of the year. resist am i right my number one game of the year is a thousand x resist shout out to sorry a thousand times resist what the fuck am i doing thousand times resist shout out to the person discord who said that the anime of vacation of into the aether will be complete if this was our number one a lot of people have guessed our list and this

than it's been. It's like, oh, I don't know. I don't know about two through ten, but number one for AJ is going to be a thousand times resist. Number one for Steven is going to be metaphor in Brendan's persona. Yeah. This This game, you had mentioned Persona 3 as like a, I almost said performative, as like a profound media experience that you, the most profound media experience you've had this year. Yeah.

that is exactly how i feel about a thousand times resist i mean we made a five-hour podcast episode about it and we've spent several many more hours outside of a podcast all talking about it the discord uh forum thread in our server is like active every day, but once

every time somebody new plays like starts or finishes the game that channel explodes with just like CIA redacted documents of like I liked and then just like four paragraphs shout out to the TWG discord for every reason every positive reason on earth but like Like everyone is so good about spoilers. Everything does look like legal documents. We're just all blacked out. This is the first time since.

13 sentinels that i've seen a server look like that or like a space look i'm actually excited to finally dig in because i've purposely avoided all that because i wasn't sure like what our plans were you know i i uh was waiting for you to finish it as well so i'm excited to see the conversations that this is this you mentioned like don't play mouth washing to sit on it like that's kind of what i've done with this game yeah i've just like been setting up anyway continue um

13 Sentinels is actually a great game to bring up because that is kind of how I feel about this game and partly because also Chris Plant. shout out uh brought this to his besties list and was like you know it's his 13 sentinels a year but uh I mean, major shout out really to Willa and Robin from Girl Mode because this...

This game and Crow Country came out on the same day. Oh, wow. Or like one day apart or something. When I was checking, they had both just came out and I had pinged them in the weekend. We have like a side like friend discord server. And I said, hey. which one of these should I pick up? And they both hated Crow countries. They were like, definitely pick up a thousand times as this.

crow country's not worth it and then the next day when reviews for crow country dropped they were like just kidding i guess we're wrong but anyway you already but they're totally i mean yes apples and oranges yeah um but yeah so shout out to them for pushing me in that direction but i mean just like everything about this game is I hesitate to say it, but perfect. I understand the the and agree with the complaint about the orchard being hard to navigate and blah, blah, blah. But like I.

I don't know, dude. I like to me, and this is not directed at you, Steven, to be clear. I'm not like, I'm just like, aggregating things that I've heard it's also okay if we disagree it's totally fine yeah yeah but I'm just like I'm not like thinking of like I'm everything Steven said is wrong yeah that's what I'm trying not to come across no no no I mean I'm excited to hear you gush about it yeah it's just like everything about this game is is so like lovingly crafted I think and just like

man, to the point of almost wordlessness with how much I love this game. But I think just at a very high level, the narrative is possibly one of the best

pieces of written media I have ever experienced in my entire life. It is about so much on so many different levels like it is about individual people and and it is about systems and it is about uh you know what it means to have loved ones and like it's it's it's about protest it's about diaspora it's about like being a shitty teenager it's ah it's just it it is it is it is such a real human story wrapped up in one of the most buck fucking wild stories.

that that I have ever I have ever experienced like it is it is the comparison when I first started playing this game was to 13 Sentinels and I you know I think it's it's iffy but I do think I get the reflex to yeah i see more near in it having finished it i think there's a lot more like at least in terms of the visuals and in terms of like uh the what the themes are about i i guess the 13 sentinels comparison would be more for like just

here's another really out there narratively driven game. Yeah. And I think it's like the, the early chapters are very much like, here's like a bunch of proper nouns. I'm like, you'll, you get it. Do you understand the, if you, if you ever get around to near on a model, like the, your system feels very all.

mother-esque like glory to mankind feels like a hair to hair kind of absolutely yeah um i just like just the basic idea of like what if when you were your shittiest teen self that was frozen in time forever and was the last hope for humanity oh yeah that's not to keep butting in but like you mentioned uh like being a shitty teenager and i think one of the coolest

not coolest but like one of the most interesting choices and i think a testament to this game's level of writing is the fact that iris is like initially a very unlikable character yeah you know like and I guess not unlikable, but she's a real teenager. And when you're that age, like...

you are going to treat other people very poorly because you're figuring things out yourself. Yeah. And when someone comes to your house, or and you're gonna want to like leave home because your parents don't want you to or whatever you know it's like yeah i think it does a great job i mean every all the flashbacks with like her life with her parents and with jow that was all incredible stuff i mean they're really like

I mentioned liking the first half more. I think narratively it all worked for me. I just think I like... like those moments you mentioned how each chapter is kind of like a different game and like those directed sequences of communion i found really powerful and especially when it's like a very this is also very near where the camera will just move and suddenly it's a side scroller um like

I love that stuff in the communion chapters. Yeah, yeah. I think the, trying to focus my thoughts a little bit, is it's easier to go kind of like character by character. I think Watcher as the character you inhabit throughout the game like her job is to watch like she is watching by by you know experiencing the communions and everything but like

it's also not so subtly being like this is you the like pointing at the player like you are watcher here like you are this is your job is to watch and experience these stories um and and the way that develops throughout the game and the the like um you know sticking to her guns even though it doesn't feel rightness that watcher has in the beginning of the game versus where she ends up um of like you know following her own path and and stuff um is is

a really great story i think iris's story as the all-mother through the flashbacks and and everything is is it's it's incredible i think as a story of a first generation child of immigrants like in a new place and like the tension between Iris and her mother is so real of like you can feel the resentment from Iris's mother about the way that Iris is interacting or not interacting with.

their culture, the culture from Hong Kong. And there are just so many moments where all of these characters just are so human. And I just... I don't know. I feel like I could just I could just gush like nonsense sentences about this game for like hours and hours. But like the central message of this game being resistance is not a thing that. will always quote unquote work. but it is a thing that always matters. Um, there's a character who has a line. Oh yeah. I love that scene. Yeah. About.

you know like if we didn't resist then they could say that uh it was always like this like that right it's important people recognize that there was a group that said this wasn't okay yes yes i think like sorry to cut you off again but like what the most powerful message for me was sort of like what to let go of like i think another game you know that's tackling at least a similar theme to the diaspora is venba and how a lot of that game is you know like

a child you know in canada losing touch with his you know family's heritage and then trying to reclaim that later in life and i like how that's sort of shown by like the recipes getting blurry and being erased and And that game is kind of largely about like reconnecting in that way. And I think it's interesting that.

arguably a thousand times resist is sort of about what to let go of. And there's an interesting reveal with like the alien threat, the occupants, they have a perfect memory and like, the game is making a case for like it actually is important for us to not retain everything that happened like we have to choose what to carry forward with us you know and like if we hang on to all of our trauma like we can never move forward we have to choose like what to value and what to what to

what is uh worth carrying into the future basically and it's also like what you were saying earlier i think you were talking about uh persona 3 reload of like if without death like life is kind of meaningless in some ways and and to this point about memory it's like without forgetting or leaving things in the past there's no point in remembering because if you're just going to carry all of that with you all the time then there's just there's like I don't know there's nothing to like want to

change. And you also kind of get caught in cycles. There are many characters in this game that are maybe stuck on a very specific moment of the past.

uh for better and for worse um i mean that's the thing about this game that's partially why i think you're you're you know you're you're gushing about it so much there's so much to discuss yeah there's some each chapter could have its own episode of a podcast you know yeah um the there's a one moment toward the the latter like the final quarter of the game i think um where this the whole chapter is like honestly really really harrowing but it's like flipping back and forth

between, I guess, the future and the past, which I guess is not a helpful distinction. And you get these, you're kind of getting coinciding monologues where like the the past monologue is relevant to the stuff that is happening in the in the distant distant distant future um it feels like you can feel the theater background of the developers there you can so see that on a stage yeah yeah with certain lighting and it's it's

It's going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And then there is just like this. this moment. I'm not going to spoil it because I'm getting emotional right now just thinking about it that I was like bawling my eyes out on my couch having experienced this moment. It was just like... such a profound moment of this is art. The thing you are watching and experiencing is art, but there is a real world out there, excuse me, that like matters.

so much more. And it also like... the the experiences that you're having in the game of a thousand times resist like these memories that you're creating within the game you know you have these memories that are like perfect or whatever and because it's only a uh like 13 hour experience or 16 hour experience whatever it is

So it's relatively easy to remember from the beginning of the game to the end of the game. But this switch that happens in the game in that moment is like, in real life, your memories are so far from perfect. But the feelings that these just like...

of memories that you get are the things that are like really important and really are important to carry with you and carry forward like those are the things that are important to remember is those those feelings and not necessarily like exact moments, but just like...

general uh i don't know general views of these things no matter how imperfect they are like those those are the things that like really i think matter what it means yes yes yeah um yeah geez I wasn't expecting to get re-emotional thinking about that scene again, but it's... fucking incredible um thank you for sharing that i mean thanks for being so vulnerable too i i am I cry very easily and constantly on this show, so no shame in that. I appreciate that.

it was just like somebody needed to yes neither of us did yeah it's shit ball a true um thank you nailed it uh but it's just like uh so in like i'll tear up at at like at media or whatever even in games and stuff but like to fully like the the depth of emotion that i was feeling in that moment that i'm still clearly feeling now yeah it was just so profound. This is actually the second experience this year that I've had that I would say I was moved.

um yeah i i had seen just to quickly touch on the first one i had seen the sufion stevens uh illinois's uh ballet yeah earlier this year and i was like i was fully to my core moved which is just like i don't know it's not a feeling i had ever like had that I felt like that is the only way I could express it. And so I had that feeling. And then I had that again with a thousand times resist.

and then just where it goes from from that moment toward the end of just the stuff it's saying about it kind of that same thing of like the remembering what things meant and carrying that stuff with you and you know leaving the other stuff behind because not everything fits in the backpack there you go love it uh so yeah that's that's thousand times resist that's my number one game of the year and

That rocked. Thanks for sharing that. I'm so happy it meant so much to you. And it's rare to have a piece of media that really does let you just like ball or let it out completely. I agree. It's like. Like, tearing up is, I tear up at, like, a good resolution. Even if it's not, like, especially, I'm like, oh, that was good. Yeah. Good writing. Yeah. I'm glad that it moved you in that way. I will also say it did force me to learn about the 2019 Hong Kong protests, which is the thing I...

You know, I'm I'm on uninformed about a whole lot of stuff that happens in the world as we all are, because there's so much shit is happening all the time.

uh kind of the slay the spire way to take to take the like there's something i'm missing here and then going to the internet to like how do i get farther into the spire how do i learn about history yeah literally and so as i like you know i mean we talked about it for the podcast too so that was part of reason i looked it up but like even before we we were talking about it on the podcast it's like this feels like

important context that i should have yeah definitely and and it really is like uh i don't remember who so you know many people have written about this game and i don't remember who said it but they said it's a game for a generation that hasn't been born yet. Because Iris is a child of her parents were in these 2019 protests.

moved to canada and then had her so like this is a game for about children that are being born right now yeah who will be you know 17 in 2047 or whatever it is So it's just it, even though it takes, there are certain things that take place, like, you know, X amount of years into the future, a thousand X years in the future.

It's all connected and it's all so important. And it all... the yeah I'm just saying the same things over and over again the memories and what they mean also carry over from generation to generation to generation and even though there are people that who have been in your like family line or whatever, who you will never remember because the people who, you know, like your grandparents, grandparents also don't remember them, but like they have shaped where you are right now in some ways is just.

also just a wild thing to think about. Anyway, it's a good video game. Jesus Christ. Uh, thank you. That's all I got. Thank you. That was amazing. That was really well said. Why don't we, well, congrats sharing our full Goatee list. Why don't we take a little break here and then come back with the Discord Goatee, honorable mentions, and then we will settle on a top five for the show. Sounds good. See you then.

Hello, Into the Aether. It's Murray Cameron Smith. You may know me from video games. My game of the year for 2024 is a deck builder that expands the limits of what a deck builder can be. Starting from the simple concept of playing poker hands, you soon learn to stack the odds in your favor, decks with only 3s in them, or near guaranteed chances of hitting a straight. The game's next layer then begins to reveal itself. Special cards that, when combined, create powerful and unexpected results.

This game, starting with the letters BA, is, of course, Batankaitos, Eternal Wings, and The Lost Ocean for Nintendo GameCube. Thank you, Steven, Brendan, and AJ, for a fantastic 2024. Truly surreal to be here floating around the Aether. Goodbye. And we are back with the results from the Discord poll. for 2024. Big shout out to my good friend Andy. He heard me in passing mention how I manually count, previously manually counted the votes when I pleaded to not add Minesweeper to all the results.

And he was like, I could just do that for you with like some cool formulas.

saved me hours and I liked doing it mainly for a while but we have thankfully a heavy problem we have so many participants we had the close to 300 votes this year wow so uh huge help uh andy with the formulas for both go toy and goatee yes let me do uh let me maybe do yeah do goatee first 10 to 1 go to first yeah and then we'll share the goat toy results uh the number 10 discord game of the year uh with 32 votes at 102 points is like a dragon, infinite wealth.

number nine with 36 votes also with 102 points so points wise the tide but this one had more votes is The Legend of Zelda Echoes of Wisdom. Shout out. Shout out number eight with 33 votes and 103 points just barely snatching the hat. Snagging the hat. Was Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Wow. Number seven with 44 votes and 135 points, Persona 3 Reload. Yes. Beautiful. Number...

with 51 votes and 140 points Animal Well, a game that I did not realize was absent from these lists until right now. Yeah, that's probably a surprise omission. That was another EP. That's when I just got to way late. I was like, I need a good...

solid week or two with this game yeah and this game alone yeah yeah i imagine you'll talk about it with your honorable mentions i may or may not okay uh i think it made your top 69 if i had to guess yeah Number five with 50 votes and 169 points, Astro Bot. i am astrobot uh sorry the game of the year game the game awards game of the year winner astrobot yes uh number four with 55 votes and 186 points is ufo 50 yes

Number three, with 74 votes, 297 points, 1000 times resist. Shout out. Great. Number two, a bit of a jump to 108 votes. to 425 points metaphor re fantazio And the number one Discord game of the year. This is a great pick. 133 votes, 445 points. Balatro. You say Balatro, I say Balatro. That's a great list. Really good list, yeah. That's better than my list.

uh so bala shows the game of the discord yeah we also did a go toy poll which we have uh basically we count the the number of unique so everyone got to vote for one uh the form was and also worth noting a gody was a weighted vote obviously um but uh for go toy you vote for one your favorite game you played this year that came out in years past and we then count the total of unique games mentioned and then the off chance that one of those games gets four or more votes

we include them in the list of go toys for the discord so let's start with how many unique games we got and then we'll share all the ones that got four or more votes yeah uh with 150 unique titles brought to the GoToy poll. How many total votes were there? So 150 unique titles, 217 votes. and the ones that broke the four threshold are from bottom to top. All of these games had four. Alan Wake 2.

I'm going to read this one last. Slay the Princess, Yakuza 0, and Chrono Trigger. Wow. Shout out. All have four. Wow. A bunch of people had a great year playing Chrono Trigger for the first time. Talk about life changing. With five votes is Octopath Traveler 2. Very active channel for that game as well. Yeah. Discord. Yeah. Nice. Number six.

nope with six votes uh baldur's gate three yes and the number one go toy based on the sum of votes uh with nine votes is yakuza like a dragon oh interesting yeah yeah wow uh so yakuza zero and yakuza like a dragon on this list uh it's a great game yeah it's a great game i understand i've i've never seen nine we've only done this twice yeah for go toys but i've never seen more than like four or five yeah i do think there was i know i believe it was

biscuit in the discord had made up a uh like a blog post or something that was like how to play the yakuza games yes um and so i i believe probably some of this is a result of that yeah that but pretty widespread definitely some game big hits from last year yeah but yeah i mean that's

That's cool to see Chrono Trigger just be there. Yeah, Chrono Trigger is just there. It's very funny. I love that. Thank you to everyone who participated in those polls. It's always so fun to share the data. And now that we have Andy...

in our in our team in our corner it's not me just like over a you know macbook for hours and hours so okay and now honorable mentions honorable mentions I can go through mine pretty quickly so one I've kind of already alluded to is Shin Megami Tensei V Vengeance this game fucking rocks it might be my favorite smt game can i tell you something yeah it's my second most played game on steam this year I think it's the thing. The only reason I didn't count it is because it just

I had SMT5 on my list back when that came out. And even though there is a lot that's different, it does feel kind of like an expansion. I think it totally counts for anyone else. I just kind of chose, let me highlight other things. i everyone knows i like smt5 i don't have to you know i felt okay taking that but it is an incredible game and definitely one of my favorites i play this year um another one is like a dragon infinite wealth uh which kind of

is somehow an honorable mention and a yippee i mean me too yeah here's one that was very close to being 10 was trails through daybreak which is the latest Trails game I played a good this is one of my most played games on PS5 I'm like 20 or 30 hours in it's really good I don't

like it quite as much as i like the older entries of trails but it is a really cool beginning to a new arc and i really like the main character so if nothing else i'm a huge van arc ride head uh thanks van for all the memories Crow Country also one of my honorable mentions a really cool yet another like PS1 the thing about this game though is that it's like

like going for Resident Evil on the PS1, but the character models are like Final Fantasy VII polygons, which I really like. And it's kind of in this creepy... sort of like five nights at freddy's i guess sort of animatronic creepy theme park i had a great time with it um just you know was on the cusp these two are interesting because i think in any other year possibly even next year they will be on the list but they're both early access games

so I didn't count them but Fields of Mystria and Hades 2 are fucking fantastic yeah and we'll probably like they are definitely if they come out in 1.0 next year no way they won't make my list I just didn't really feel the need to add them now yeah they're both like in very playable state

i just want to wait until like the 1.0 release comes out before i really fully you know evaluate them shout out to my co-worker eric uh who's worked in the games industry for a long time when i asked him what is

game of the year was he said well i've put 150 hours into hades 2 so i feel like it should be that but also i feel like it can't be that which i thought was the perfect response yeah i uh i i'm glad i checked out hades 2 when it came out but i also am glad i took a break from it because like i want to wait yeah but it's fantastic so far and Fields of Mysteria I think has the chance

to be the next Sardew Valley. Yeah. Yeah. When that comes out like fully in 1.0, it'll skyrocket on the list. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to do great. I should say demolish. negative yeah uh stardew valley will be removed from steam anymore yeah um those are my little mentions Thank you. I'll do mine. As I've mentioned many times throughout the year, my method for figuring out Goaty is I have a list that is just constantly growing so I can like rearrange stuff in real time as I'm playing it.

um i'm always really excited for the first game in a year that makes me need to make a backlogged goatee list oh yeah which is exciting but i very readily have numbers 11 through 20 available um and as i also mentioned you can head over to wavelengths if you want to learn about 21 through 50 as well but I'll just go from 11 to 20 here number 11 the thing that almost made my list almost beat Earth Defense Force 6

is Shy Guy Surfing. Yes. God, I wanted that game to make the top 10, but it just could not... I think it's an incredible accomplishment. If you've seen me play it on the internet or heard me talk about it, you know how effusive I am for that thing. Go check it out if you haven't. Number 12, I'm not going to do a better job than AJ did, but it's a thousand times resist.

just an amazing video game number 13 another game I really wish I could have given its flowers and unfortunately like I just don't think it's gonna make most people's top 10 list and it couldn't make mine was MEO the smiling man oh yeah Famicom Detective Club I could not stop playing that game until it was done i pulled a lot of like late night

playing that game because I just needed to know what was going to happen next. You had to solve the mystery. Yes. It is now having played more of the other ones the best Famicom Detective Club game by a huge margin and is one of the best stories of the year i've experienced um yeah i'm dying to play it that'll be next halloween probably it's you awesome that sentence just made it a yippee yeah

It's awesome. Snag the yippee. Snag the yippee. What's a last minute yippee? You're both going to like it a lot. i'm sure i will yeah emio the smiling man uh great game uh number 14 this was my this was on my yippie list uh like a dragon infinite wealth i really just think like if i could have finished it it probably would have been much much higher some of what they're doing in that game is just unbelievable and we can talk about it again at some point

Number 15, again, can't believe it's this low. It's Dragon's Dogma 2. Still... an amazing game I mean that episode that we did about it is like one of the most fun episodes I think we've released this year like I loved talking about that game and I always love talking about that game and I think like

Like a lot of the games on this list, I think, will only get better over time. Like, I think in three years when I'm like, you know what game I want to go back to? That's why I got number 10 for me. I just had that feeling as well. I think that's going to be one that needs to be revisited. Number 16.

very recent entry and one that I talked about only briefly on the show but didn't really talk about a whole lot uh pokemon emerald sea glass oh yeah which is a rom hack of pokemon emerald that was made by one developer who took the entire game and redid the whole art style in gen 2 sprites So it's a mixing of the third generation with a generation two presentation, but also adds a bunch of incredible quality of life improvements like the DexNav, which allows you to like...

choose a pokemon in the area that you're like trying to catch and then it'll like find it like in the map so you can like just go there and catch that Pokemon. Things like the ability to increase or decrease the amount of shinies that you can get, difficulty modes.

the ability to just use all of your hms without needing to teach them to pokemon which is like just a godsend in that game in particular where it's like even mainstream pokemon eventually dive whirlpool and waterfall it's like i don't i don't need i don't need that yeah i don't even want to catch that weird feel and just teach everything exactly um

there are about a million and a half great quality of life improvements that make emerald sea glass like a pretty transformative rom hack instead of what i thought it was initially which is just like what if pokemon emerald but with a different art style and it honestly has

I think in in in my estimation considering how quickly I have almost gotten to the end of it already um become my second favorite playthrough of Pokemon Emerald since literally the first time I did it hell yeah it is just exhilarating your favorite Game Boy Advance game yes It rocks and I can't recommend it highly enough.

um number 17 prince of persia the lost crown yeah early hit early hit earliest hits of the year yeah great game i mean awesome metroidvania it's uh like literally just negligence and stupidity that led to that studio closing like i think ubisoft should be just propping that team up and giving them all the resources to make a million of these things but

great game i'm glad that they made it uh number 18 animal well um this game i think for me as much as i really liked it it got buried in two specific things number one was launching right around when lorelei and the laser eyes also launched

so playing both those games literally simultaneously i was like i'm in kind of this like puzzle nightmare hell yeah yeah um and both games like when i when i got stuck in one i would go to the other one when you were reading berserk while playing elden ring yes it's a lot like that and then All it really led me to do was go play Fez again. And then I ended up playing through Fez three times in a row.

it was someday that's kind of what happened with the veil guard where i ended up going back to origins as a point of comparison i just ended up playing origins more yeah same actually yeah um but animal well still incredible game um by itself i just think like a remarkable work similar to emerald sea glass or balatro like A solo developer putting something like that together I think is just really remarkable. So shout out to Billy Basso for making Animal Well. Number 19.

this is the game that i didn't talk about on the show at all i just don't know how it didn't come up but i did have like a real spell where i was completely obsessed with it and i'm amazed i never brought it to the show which is nintendo world championships nes edition oh yeah i didn't hear anything about this

fucking love this thing it like again what What's fascinating about it and why I wanted to bring it up specifically is I think in comparison to my feelings about UFO 50, which is this way of interacting with the NES era without actually needing to interact with the NES era because I kind of...

And as I mentioned in my video about it, I don't really like a lot of those games. I find them to feel a little bit too old and obtuse and inapproachable. NES World Championships, like... finds a way to like modernize the experience that I usually have with the NES games like

In 2024, when I am playing an NES game, it is usually like I will boot up a retro handheld. I will jump into it. I will mess around with it for maybe an hour max. I'll put it down and that'll be it probably for like another three years. World Championships NES edition is like... What if you just needed to beat 1-1 of Super Mario Brothers?

what if you just needed to get the sword in zelda it was like a it was like this because this was an older game too that was like kind of the first like nintendo esport right there was like a contest around or something yeah it wasn't a game it was like literally an event it was a global event that they held where like they invited people to come out and like

try and do all of these kind of speed running challenges in real life and uh finding a way to turn that into a game that has again like global leaderboards and uh the ability to like watch your own ghost play you know like race your own ghost in one one of Super Mario Brothers is amazing it is so fun i love it to death uh it is a game that i think like came out and just kind of fell off the map immediately and i really think it deserves a real look

um i've heard a lot of people say they thought it was included in their nintendo online membership um which i think goes to show like how poorly nintendo marketed that thing yeah i forgot this even happened yeah uh i'm glad you liked it it's amazing uh another one to give a shout out again another one that is like just go to northern lions youtube channel and just watch him play this game you will lose your fucking mind sounds awesome great

uh number 20 last one on the honorable mentions list little shout out here web fishing um i mean just some of the most fun i had all year was playing web fishing with our friends Yeah, I gotta join in on that. I know it's a little hard to configure on Steam Deck, but I want to web fish. I've got a I still haven't played web fishing for the record but I've got a I'm organizing a group for a game early next year that is like from like three disparate friend groups

And I'm like, we should all play web fishing one night. Yeah, it's like I kind of get to know each other. Yeah, it's a great idea. Yeah. uh love web fishing those are my honorable mentions aj hell yeah uh my honorable mentions uh i don't have these numbered so here's except for this one um Except for these two because I love numbering one. This one's seven. Eleven and twelve used to be ten at one point. The first is Helldivers 2. Just an amazing multiplayer experience.

so so so much fun um i had a wild wildly good time playing that game yeah shout out to that one guy that i can't remember Kim, I can't remember his name, but I was playing with Kim and Chase. and we've been playing for like an hour and a half or like two hours or something and then we queued up and accidentally did like a quick match so we were paired with a fourth rando nice we were like oh shit

yeah we're playing with a random person like and you know the game was still early on and like we weren't really sure like what the vibes were i mean like ah fuck uh and it was a dude that had all the highest battle pass armor on and like a bunch of shit i'm like ah he's gonna fucking hate us yeah and we dropped

and this dude chase was the only one who could hear him because uh the rest of us didn't have our mics on um like in the game we had our mics on on discord but chase had his stuff on and he was just like like really, really nice. Like, Oh, Hey, what's up guys. I'm going to hear here. I'm going to, and he threw down like three drones. He's like, each of you take one of these drones.

uh i'll just kind of be hanging back like like supporting you guys you guys do whatever you know to take care of everything and then it was like your chaperone he was literally our chaperone because it was it was through one of the like mid-level robot battles you had the experience that

game company wanted every online experience they have when they made Journey yeah yes yes oh my god so I know it's shitty out here but like just follow me and maybe believe in god I'm gonna take you to all the secrets and you're gonna experience the totality of life yeah yeah But it was just like such a while. And my computer had crapped out at that point because I was using my laptop still. And so I was just like listening to them play it and like watching Chase stream it through Discord.

he was just like being so gracious and like anytime they would get a kill on like a mid tier enemy, he'd be like, hell yeah, brother. um it was just like drop it it was such a wholesome experience it was so much fun or npc yeah yeah um and then there was another time i was playing with uh matt and kim and we got uh uh paired up with another rando and we were just kind of like

splashing around in mud puddles, and this random person was also splashing around in mud puddles with us. It was just such a great time. That game is so much fun. I want to play it more, especially now with this new zombie faction. Anyway, that used to be number 10. It was bumped out. by 20 small mazes a game we played for dot zip which is literally just like if you took like a highlights magazine

that had a bunch of mazes in it and you just spread them all out over a table and then you did 20 mazes for like 30 minutes. That's awesome. I'm more of a one big dice guy. uh that feels like a game that should be multiplayer 20 small mazes yeah that would be very good yeah

It's really good. We talked a bunch about it on the episode. I'm not going to talk more about it. It's just so much fun and you should play it because it's free. I'm very excited for Strange Puzzles, which is coming out. Strange Jigsaw. Strange Jigsaws.

which is this developer's next game coming out next year my next honorable mention is another crab's treasure oh yeah I played a decent amount of this game it's really really funny I know all of your honorable mentions and most of your actuals I'm like uh-huh Yeah, well, it's because all my honorable mentions take more than three hours. Yes. Yes. But I did put I put a bunch of time into another crab treasure over like two months. I know a friend of the show and artist of the art scout.

um devoured this game uh she loved it um it's a really cool take it's a really solid souls like it's it's Super fun. Yeah, it's just a great time. Another best boss theme. Oh my God. Of the year. Yeah. Really good. Um, Ballotro maybe. Ballotro man. Best boss theme. Betoate. Betoate. Metaphor's got some good boss battles. Yeah. Uh. Elden Ring, Shadow of the Earth Tree. Yeah. That is, of all the yippies I've yipped.

I've yet to get to it. Yeah. Wait, this feels like our golden son is absent from the Game Boy Advance moment. I feel like we should shout this out for a second. Sure. My feeling about Shadow of the Earth Tree, because a lot of people asked us if we were going to play it, if it counted, et cetera, et cetera. My feeling about Shadow of the Earth Tree is it basically boils down to I played...

so much Elden Ring so quickly. Yes. And I just need a break from Elden Ring before I go back to it. I'm feeling the pullback, but I want it to be, well, we... 90 hours literally i mean i've said this i think i've said this on yourself right i needed to go to a doctor yeah when i was done playing elden ring is how quickly i played it so we could have episodes about it yeah i guess the point is we don't want to rush getting to uh yeah

because we both want to make new characters anyway yeah but unfortunately it seems like every fucking calendar year fromsoft is going to release a new elden ring now there's elden ring fortnight yes yes suddenly it's like a dragon yeah but i i do want to play one next year it's great me too yeah um yeah it's fun i put 30 more hours into it it just felt like more elden ring when that's Great, because Elden Ring's a good video. Sign me up. Yeah. I feel like I have to shout out Star Trucker.

I've only played like six hours of it, but I had a great time playing it. There's definitely stuff that needs to be tweaked that I hope they will patch in because they're updating pretty regularly. They still haven't patched in like... HOTAS support? I don't know how you say the acronym. H-O-T-A-S, which is like the flight stick controls. Hotel of the United.

Uh, AS. Oh, sorry. Yeah, so that's Star Trekker. I just have to shout that out because I think it was my most anticipated game of the year at last year's Game Awards. Also, Click Holding by Strange Scaffold. Yeah. The game at... It's like the story of the game is like I could take it or leave it really. But I think the mechanic of like having to actually click 10,000 times is very fun. And like I wound up picking my mouse up and holding it like a clicker to use my thumb to click because it was.

Hurting my wrist to use my pointer finger. Yeah. Yeah. And finally is Zenless zone zero. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That I played a bunch of when it came out. I played it for like a solid week, like every every day.

for like a week and then off and on for like another week after that. And then I just never went back to it. It's just... it's such a stylish game and the fighting is just like fun to watch the fighting is really good i played a bit of it and i liked the battles a lot i just really didn't like a lot of the character design and i didn't like everything else in it and i mean i actually like because i i played a lot of hunkai star rail so i was like

interested in it because i i was surprised at how much hunk of sterile worked for me um even though i eventually kind of bounced off that but i i really did enjoy the first couple planets of that game yeah i just i found like the combat is great why is there so much puzzle and like dialogue and all this stuff that just doesn't work i remember that being a big complaint is like the tutorial takes like

10 hours and my game of the year is metaphor re fantasia a game that doesn't let you play until like hour an hour and a half in yeah you're right yeah so i'm a patient man yeah yeah uh yeah i have no zen in this in the this is a zero yeah there you go yeah zenless zone zero was my number 50 game for a long time and then got bumped out to 51 brutal by uh warhammer 40k i can see why it's popular though like you know i i think it's i think it's cool they're they're trying out different genres

yeah it's fun and it just like it looks it looks great the fighting is so fun to look at yeah anyway shall we to the top five of the show i think we should yeah exciting another another yippee for me actually now that we're talking about big it's really caught on big open world uh mobile games that i should have checked out and i didn't infinity nicky yeah people love that people love we got recently that was like a pretty recent release right yeah like

two weeks ago something like that like really recent yeah maybe we'll count it for next year let's do oh you know what actually quickly and i know i know we're strapped for time i want to i want to know about our guesses oh sure yeah yeah i i think i was pretty off but i don't remember yeah uh steven actually you got uh you got brendan's number 13 meo called it amazing yeah Uh, so Stephen had, uh, from one to 10, uh, UFO 50, uh, persona three reload.

so that was pretty i just flipped them yeah yeah uh dragon quest 3 bellotro astrobot Echoes of Wisdom, Metaphory Fantasio, Animal Well, Dragon's Dogma, and Shy Guy Surfing at number 10. Interesting. So we got a few. Order was off. And then 11 was Earth Defense Force, which you were there, and then 12 was a thousand times resist. Wow.

that's that's pretty good actually considering how wild this year is yeah yeah i think i was on i was on the right track in certain areas yeah let's hear brendan's uh and then brendan's from uh again from one to ten metaphor refantasio got it number two afk journey really He just didn't. Three is Dragon Quest 3. that has to be a bit like a dragon infinite wealth persona 3 reload

Ballotro, Fields of Mysteria, Astro Bot, Dragon's Dogma 2, Unicorn Overlord. Yeah. Okay. What I did, let me explain myself. Peek behind the curtain. You've got some crimes to answer for. What I did was I had guesses. for 10 through number two and I sorry 10 through number three and then I knew what your number one was I knew it was definitely gonna be metaphor like there was no world in which it wasn't everyone did so once I started filling out 10 through number three I was like oh

There's a spot here where another one needs to go. And I don't know what to put AFK Journey. Hey, why not? Hey, why not? Hi, friends. It's Robin here, co-host of TWG's own Girl Mode podcast. And I'm here to tell you about a game called Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. This is a game that has stuck in my head more than any other this year. It's a game that has made me feel both smarter and dumber than I think any game ever has. It's a puzzle game that asks you not only to solve the mystery of

how do I get through this locked door? Or how do I interpret this clue? But it asks you to solve the mystery of the plot, which in itself eventually becomes a puzzle piece. There was a music drop at one point in this game so good that I had to pause the game and stop and take a breath, even though the lyrics of it wouldn't make sense to me for a few more hours of play.

and I still catch myself singing it as I walk around my apartment without realizing I'm doing that. It's genuinely a masterpiece. I love this game so much. that it probably even displaces my beloved Dragon's Dogma 2 as my favorite game of the year. And that's a game that's so good at generating stories that you can be at any moment attacked.

by a griffin, jump on its back, fly with it to a bandit camp, and then take out the bandits and the griffin at the same time, and that will only be like the sixth most interesting thing that's happened to you that day. It's just that good. So honestly, maybe they are still tied. I don't know.

And either way, they're both brilliant. I love both of them. And to Brendan and Steven, thanks for inviting me on your show. Thanks for inviting me and Willa on your network. And you know what? Hit me up if you want to play webfishing again. That game rocks too. All right. All right. Let's make a five. So I have some thoughts.

that I've written down just at the start just while we were doing stuff I think it may be easier than we think I agree is where I'm kind of landing yeah let's just talk let's talk about number ones thousand times resist Feels like a great thing to make the top five. Steven, Metaphor ReFantasio.

Seems like a great game to make the top five. Yep. Persona 3 Reload seems like a great game to make the top five. Yeah. The Discord's number one is Bolotro. Also seems like a great one to make the top five. Yeah. And that just leaves us basically one extra slot.

to put a game into um we can obviously have a lot more conversations than that yeah um i have some thoughts about some games that i would like to be in that number five slot but uh i like where your head's at my thing so i have a spreadsheet here as a

it helps me if you listen to some old goaties where i didn't have a visual reference there's a lot of me being like please repeat it i think we should just make a list like i like what we do in our decade episodes or console episodes where let's just list all the contenders

and then kind of go through them and end up with a five but i think yeah like okay so uh obvious contenders i'm gonna add metaphor like all our goatees are obviously contenders thousand times resist metaphor persona three and ball of trail okay so we have our three goatees and then for the discord yeah and then what are games that we had on both our lists where's the overlap i know we both had astrobot in different places astrobot dragon quest 3 ufo 50 Astro Bot, Dragon Quest.

and earth defense for six uh to me as a person who has uh no connection to any of all any three of those games i feel like ufo 50 is the one that i would take

out of the ones that aren't our goaties. Interesting. Where you want to... it you know i would i would take that forward like if we were just going to take their weight if we were going to take all of our if we were going to take all of the number one goaties and then had a fifth slot i would say we'd fill that with ufo 50 okay is there any other gate so right now in contenders i have metaphor refantasio balatro

Persona 3 Reload, Astro Bot, Dragon Quest 3 HD2D Remake, and UFO 50. Are there any other games we want to throw into contenders?

I don't have any yeah I actually don't which I'm really surprised by like that yeah I don't feel the need to make a case for Dragon's Dogma 2 nor do I do for Unicorn Overlord Tekken 8 is a there's always a lone fighting game that i just immediately give up on and it's this year's techonite yeah looking at my six to ten like ufo 50 and thousand times resist are there so they already are in the mix and then techonite unicorn overlord dragon summon 2 i don't

feel strongly I love them but I don't feel like I need to make a case for them for the show yeah other games on my list that I think could have cracked your top 10 i think the only one actually is indiana jones and i think it would be number 10 i think it would have beat dragons augma 2 and nothing else yeah yeah i definitely think i would have liked to play that aj is there anything on your list that you feel strongly like

like Brendan and I would have really connected with and is representative of the show. Yeah. That's what I was looking at. I think nothing that I feel strongly about that I could make a case for. If we didn't play 1000 times resist, then maybe it would be that. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, for sure that, but like.

I don't know if mouthwashing would be high enough up on your list. If we were doing a top 10, I would throw a Ranger in there. Yeah, maybe a Ranger, but no, I don't think so. I think these are all good games and you should play them, but I don't know if they're emblematic of what...

where they would end up on your lists as well. A Ranger was my number 46 game of the year. Good game. So we got our contenders. We have... seven contenders yeah and five spots and five spots so seven beautiful contenders stand before me i'm gonna go i'm just gonna go through them from top to bottom there are no order right now

and uh we can talk to say if they if they have a chance or not yeah so metaphor refontasio uh i i think is a pretty obvious fit um i would be surprised if we edged that one out uh but you know my my game of the year on brendan's list one of your yippies that counts for something no yeah absolutely and the go and the discord's number two yep um and i also just think like For the show, we're big Persona fans. It fits the type of game we usually like.

So I want to put metaphor. I'm going to mark it. uh, as a, as a finalist here. Yep. Um, I, I can just go ahead and do the same for ballot show. Honestly, I don't think we need to have a conversation about that one.

I don't think we have to have a conversation about any of our number ones, really. Yeah, okay. I'm just going to mark those as permanents. I think it's really just between UFO 50, Asherbot, and Dragon Quest III, and then we have to rank them. Yeah, I do think this is the first year that we all have different number ones that were also on our other list. yeah yeah like yeah i like that that's fun

That is fun. I like that a lot. Thousand Times Resist didn't make my top 10. I'm sorry. Oh, shit. It was your album mentioned, though. It was number 12. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so basically we have...

So if we want to lock in Metaphor, Bolotro, 1,000 times resist, and Persona 3 reload, that leaves three games for, you know... regardless we're not ordering yet but for the fifth open spot we have astrobot ufo 50 and dragon quest 3 hd 2d remake you've already said that you're putting your vote behind ufo 50 i think so uh brendan what do you what do you think what

Of those three, which one would you make the strongest case for? I know this is wild because UFO 50 was my number two game of the year. I am stuck between that and Dragon Quest 3, actually. Yeah. I think Astro Bot I could knock out. Yeah, I mean, I...

Astro Bot was my third favorite game. I think reflecting on the year, I was just looking at like what... you know what did i enjoy the most what you know what stuck with me the most and astrobot was so much fun and i think it's an incredible game um b i don't i don't feel the need for it to be in the show's top five it was fairly low for you and it wasn't even on your list aj so it won the jeffies

It won the Jeffies. I think it deserved it. I think we can... say it's honorable mention in spirit and yeah i think that that makes the choice easier so we can cross that one astrobot we love you yeah a lot of rpg on this list mostly that's the thing i think if it was a different so Part of what I was nervous about was if we were going to be forced to choose Metaphor or Persona 3 Reload.

and i'm open to the my brain is open to the possibility of like having one but it's they're both like before we established that they're all our goatee picks yeah like and they're also different enough games i don't think they really overlap like i know in in in other episodes like we would have okay this game is kind of like the representative for the genre but i think in this case we do need metaphor and persona yeah i had this exact same thought process yeah

so okay so those four are locked in it basically is ufo 50 versus dragon quest 3 um this is this is very difficult yeah i do have to say i know i i pushed for ufo 50 i feel like dragon quest 3 is more the energy of of the two of you um yeah and of the show i think they both like not to be like too egocentric or anything but i think they both feel like

representative of our of our interests as people and and of the show like i i think on one hand dragon quest is like one of our obsessions yeah and this is this is a game that really worked for both of us on the other hand ufo 50 is the gamification of the show in some ways yeah uh so i also knew it's also new and holy holy new that's one thing and it's favor is like we already have a remake on here yeah um oh yeah so a three remake even yes a three make oh so i mean i'm i would be where was

let me just look at what i what i want for once so ufo 50 was six for me and dragon quest is four yeah but honestly i'd be i'd be happy with either of them uh it feels like we are edging towards ufo 50 yeah moving more towards ufo 50 the more i think about it yeah i'm not gonna rule out dragon quest yet i'm gonna just i'm gonna see how this looks

I'm just going to say this out loud. Sure. Metaphor in no order yet. Metaphor re Fantasio. Steven keeps saying that because his number one game is number one whenever he does this. Yes. Metaphor re Fantasio. Just see how it, just try it on. See how it feels. See how it feels. Fine, I'll change it up. 1,000 times resist, Balotro, Metaphory Fantasio, Persona 3 Reload, UFO 50. That looks and sounds good, which is the silliest thing to say, but sometimes that's what matters.

that's where we end up at the end of most of these it's like what feels what what has the best mouthfeel yeah i think i think we can move on to order yeah i totally agree yeah dragon quest 3 we love you yeah great great game one of the best i played this year i think um just to give it a salute on the way out oh yeah

i do think if that was the latest entry of dragon quest though yeah it would be a different i would be going much harder for it yeah one of us would be on the floor being strangled yeah yeah not that it loses any value for being a remake but i just think we want to honor

2024 yeah um but it has been an all-timer since it came out in the 80s and it is still an all-timer in this remake form it's amazing how well it holds up considering how little has changed outside of like the art style in a couple quality of life things absolutely yeah you should play it

i think by virtue i think ufo 50 probably slots in at number five pretty well not just because it has a five in the name but because that was the last one we decided yeah yeah where's volatron i was number two for you steven It was number two for both of us. Fall Show's number two. 1,000 Times Resist was number eight.

Yeah, I was going to say I would be comfortable with Bollatro at number five. I think Bollatro needs to be higher. Okay. Because it was... what two for me three for brendan and it was the game of the year for the discord sure sure and also was it on your list at all yeah it was two it was two for both oh yeah so that has to be like that i think that's an easy case

that might even be an easy case for number one honestly yeah i was thinking yeah that might be like the ultimate compromise yeah okay but uh you know we can feel it out five to one hair to hair yeah i i'm starting from five to one to make it easier although we've we can do in any order but uh i think well i think the two games vying for fifth place are probably ufo 50 and 1000 times resist I don't think I could in good conscious allow a thousand times resist to be fifth place.

well i mean i'm just saying that because it was eighth for me and it was an honorable mention for brendan yeah it was third on the discord goatee um i know but it is your goatee so yeah um yeah no i i know like why you're stacking them next to each other i'm just telling you that's how i'm feeling Yeah, okay. Well, in that case, if you're comfortable with it, Brendan, we can put UFO 50 in fifth. I think so. I don't think it makes sense to put anything else.

lower than that yeah although it was higher for you so maybe like would you want that above balatro for example i'm okay with it being fifth because that means persona 3 reload won't be fifth yeah i mean that's the thing none of our goaties will be fifth yeah and yeah so and it's making the list which is

Checking it twice was pretty friggin' cool. In a year where the finals came out. Oh, man. Making the list is... pretty okay i have ufo 50 currently in fifth place it's not locked in but we're putting it there number four here how aj how how sacrilegious would it be to put the all mother in the fourth spot

As long as it's not fifth, honestly, like in my mind, my... I mean, fifth is not... To be clear, fifth is not like an insulting spot. I'm just... Yeah. Yeah. I... know that i there there will not be a case to be presented to put it above persona or metaphor um i think there's a case to be made i if you think there's a case to be made i mean i don't know i like i would i would like to see it at like

two probably but i mean i like it a lot uh i don't feel quite as strongly but i also like you're so passionate about that obviously means a lot so we can maybe maybe let's

Let's rest on a thousand times for this and move on to a different game here. Persona 3 Reload. So this is one that was fifth for me. It was Game of the Year for Brendan. I wonder if this would be a decent... well what do you think brendan what would you this is your game of the year where do you want to advocate for it to be i mean i want to advocate for it to be number one that's not happening um I think you would want this above metaphor. Yes. Yeah. It's the best game of all time.

It's, it's, uh, yeah. Go, go, go-tay. I, I see. Oh no, it's just goat. That's, that's what goat is. I like goat. This is very, goat-ay. Game of, game of the all years.

how about we all i think maybe let's all propose a top five and then we can average it out that might be the easiest way to do this if that works for you so i can see because i'm looking at it on the spreadsheet i can this is one that I would recommend that I think is a pretty decent compromise Bollotro number one, Persona 3 Reload, Metaphor, 1,000 times resist.

ufo 50 however it doesn't need to be a compromise you know i think like last year for example we kind of coaxed you brendan to letting balder's gate 3 be the game of the year so uh you know it doesn't necessarily have to be like a mean average If any of us have a passionate case for it, we can make it. proposed list feels good i think that you say can you say it again because i have a very different proposed list yeah i said uh i proposed balatro persona 3 reload metaphor 1000 times resist

and then UFO 50. Why are you proposing that? Why am I proposing that? Yeah. Why do you think the metaphor is under Persona 3 Reload in the list that you're proposing. I'm feeling the vibe of the room and I'm trying to find a compromise that works for everyone. I also will say... I did play a little bit of my political capital last year, nudging BG three into one. So I'm happy to take the L for metaphor. And exactly. I mean, metaphor and personality reload to me are kind of.

like i i have said already today on this microphone yeah i think metaphor is the best game atlas has made but i also love persona 3 and that was one of our best games of the decade yeah the question is do we have to honor it twice

There's another curveball. Tis the question. It's interesting. I think... I would like metaphor to be in the top three and I mean another proposal is if we want to have all our goaties are our personal goatees in the top three uh i just think balatra being one like takes the pressure off any one of our goatees being top three you know uh but do we want a number one that we're that's like all of our second favorite

kind of thing. Yeah, I think I would rather have R3 as top three in Bollatro and four. Okay. Really? That's interesting. Yeah, that is interesting. Okay. I played a lot of Ballotro and I think we all played a lot of Ballotro and had a great time with it, but I feel like we were all affected by our number ones. Yeah, no, that's a great point. Like emotionally and physically, mentally. That's interesting. Which I think is something to consider.

yeah i i'll say this i'm less precious about persona 3 reload mainly because it is a remake and that is a thing to consider yeah that's that's really where i'm coming at it so for me my proposed list would be Bolotro metaphor a thousand times resist Persona 3 reload UFO 50 that's that's where i see this shaking out um balatro obviously like indie game solo developer game we're all obsessed with and have dumped a ton of time into steven it broke

the mold of games that you think that you're interested in winner of the indie game award AJ you play it while you're making a bagel and I play it while I'm going to the bathroom And Discord Game of the Year. And Discord Game of the Year. I think it's exceptional. Metaphor I have as number two because of the three of us. You and I connected with it the most.

I didn't play it so I don't know. It was runner up for... discord and it was runner up for discord yeah you didn't play it uh but it's on your but it's on my you're also i mean you're obviously your vilcans but you're on a very different journey from us yes you know so i feel like we're gonna have less overlap yeah that's the thing i don't even have any sort of like persona lens to like even give

what like a no your perspective is valid as me like we're gonna end up with different games yeah yeah yeah i just think again it is a new thing yes it is a game that has been on a long road to release and when it came out like did everything right uh so that feels like a correct thing to have it number two number three a thousand times resist this is a situation where like i know that i'm an outlier here and this is another game by a studio making a thing for the first time and once again like

everything else that has happened this year it seems pretty remarkable and even though i haven't connected with it on that level yet because i haven't finished it i can understand how it's affected the people around me and i would definitely be happy with that and yeah and you know i'm happy i'm sure when i finish it i'm gonna be like cool i'm glad it's there yes

then Persona 3 Reload I think just because it was my number one and it feels weird to have that all the way down at the bottom of the list basically and then UFO 50 because you know great great video game great 50 great video game So you're saying Balatro, Metaphor, 1,000 times resist, Persona 3, UFO 50. Yeah.

that that sounds good i guess like i like baltron's number one i do i'm hanging on to what aj said about our top threes being in the top three yeah i like that yeah i just don't know which it is because i think like i i again i'm happy to have a thousand times with this on the list but i would feel like i'm you know not fully voiced in my opinion if it was number one

sure um and i'm sure you two would feel the same way if it was metaphor or persona 3 reload then i i would prefer to swap my number one in the top three then with balatro So what do you mean? Like, so if you're saying that our three number ones need to be one, two, and three in some kind of order, I would say remove persona three from that and replace my number one with ball. Interesting. I would rather have ball up towards the top than persona three reload. Interesting. Okay.

I would if that's the case I would rather have Balotro in the three spot thousand times resist two metaphor in one I mean that's good by me I feel like in a lot of ways Balotro's got its flowers and like every outlet out there and like you know not to yeah you know i mean i guess it's like outside context like true to ita i'm wondering if

i'm happy it's there but i'm just wondering if if thousand has just said number two is a little too high i feel like where it fell for for brendan and i i feel like thousand times resist in the next year is going to prove to be a 13 sentinels like i can't believe oh i'm sure it is i'm just saying like because When we choose the top five for the show, it's like for the three of us.

you know and I just wonder if that's like oh yeah i don't know i mean there's no real way to do this without bumping something down or bumping something up so so metaphor i like how i'm shying away from my game of the year being number one uh metaphor number one thousand times resist you said then baltro and then persona 3 and then ufo 50 i mean i wouldn't in that case i would actually prefer to swap ufo 50 and persona 3 reload again and then swap ufo 50 yeah oh and have that be number four i

I don't know why you're putting yours further and further down I honestly think you should put it higher especially hearing how much like I don't know I but then it's a similar thing where like it already got my number one yeah that's true that's

that's the important i just think like aj's thing of like all three of our number one being one two three yeah i like that honestly i mean i would be happy with it being metaphor a thousand times resist persona three reload and then balutra ufo 50 i mean this this part is almost like slightly arbitrary because these are all like our favorite games oh yeah i mean yeah well the thing that i'm

you know i i appreciate the our number ones as one two and three thing but the thing that i'm really sticking to is balatro was in the top three for all of us yeah no you're right i think and was the number one for the discord which i i think counts no i think it does too um that feels to me like something that should be rewarded i think if it is the if this is the list that is supposed to be the culmination of the three of us and then also the discord as well like

Doesn't the game that was number one for them and made our top three deserve to be in the top three, at least for us? i think so i mean i think this is this is we feel it out differently each year yeah uh but that that's why i'm fighting so hard to put balatro as high up as possible okay i mean i

the games that I feel comfortable at number one are Balotro and Metaphor. Um, I mean, those are, you know, my top two. Uh, but I, I guess, do you, do either of you feel like you would rather have Balotro at number one than Metaphor? Yes.

yeah i guess he hasn't played it and i had it at number seven yeah i think if we're going math mathematically i i think it it makes sense to have balotron number one i just yeah i was going more spiritually emotionally oh yeah i get it no it's that it's always a balance of that and it's left brain versus right brain yeah

um what's fun though is i feel like i'm also going at it spiritually and coming to a completely different conclusion like i don't i don't i don't feel like i'm mathing it out at all it's more just like balatro is the intersection of all of us yeah this year yeah it's true okay and i just love local thanks so much so i think one of you already i'm typing this out and i'm gonna friggin say it uh and then we'll see how we feel but this this looks like it reaches a nice

middle ground um okay so number one baltro number two metaphor refantasio number three one thousand times resist number four persona three reload and number five ufo 50 yes I think we had this previously. That's what I proposed. Yeah, I think this is the one. Does this feel good for you, AJ? Yeah.

yeah i think so yeah yeah i think um i am i'm very happy with this this is also we had the same top three as the discord which is fun oh really yeah because they also had uh baltron metaphor 1000 times resist that rocks actually yeah I think their four and five was Astro Bot and UFO 50 actually, wasn't it? That's sick.

sorry astrobot but persona 3 gets the gets the spot yeah the uh the top five of the discord was balatro metaphor 1000 times resist ufo 50 and then astrobot so basically we have almost the same except for persona 3 reload wow amazing we have handcrafted our audience or they have handcrafted us yeah um okay cool i'm just gonna say this again yeah five to one hair to hair yes five ufo 50 yes Doing great. Four Persona 3 reload. Yeah. Three 1,000 times resist. So many numbers. Yes.

metaphor, re-fantasio. And number one, Balotro. I don't like it. I love it. I think that's it. Yeah. Yeah. I think that is it. I think so. Wow. That's a good top five, baby. I like that. I feel really good about it. I think so too. I'm looking at it on a little notebook and it's looking real good. Yeah. Do we want to go around, recap our top tens?

yeah let's do it do the show top five and then do a little and then do a little outro situation we're making good time we got enough time to we have to be out of here relatively soon we got 10 10 minutes before we can really quickly put all this stuff away and be out of here yeah oh yeah i guess i'll do mine first so 10 to 1 is dragon's dogma 2 unicorn actually i'm gonna let me channel a certain game announcer I like. Dragon's Dogma 2 Unicorn Overlord 1000 times resist Tekken 8

UFO 50. Persona 3 Reload. Dragon Quest 3 HD 2D Remake. Astro Bot. Polotrope. Metaphor Refantasio. I like that. That was good. Thanks. Oh, fuck yeah. Fuck yes. Earth Defense Force 6. Then Gun Show at number 9. This is like less enthusiastic than you normally have. Astrophot. Metaphor-ry-fun-te-tazio. Tazio. It's Tazio. Smile. Smile for the crowd. Zelda. Echoes of wisdom. Jesus Christ.

This isn't even like close to the longest one that we've done and we're losing it. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

yes dragon quest 3 hd 2d remake seeds of salvation for the nintendo switch and also steam and playstation 5 and the xbox series of consoles okay balatro okay ufo 50 and persona 3 reload number 10 arctic eggs number nine sheepy a short adventure number eight home safety hotline number seven mouth washing number six fear the spotlight number five ten dead doves number four a ranger a role puzzling adventure number three psychroma number two bellatro number one a thousand times

resist zero sheepy again i did play sheepy two times yeah uh amazing well this was so much fun to do friends uh thanks again nobles countrymen countrymen nobles and thank you so much for listening I don't even know how long this one is per usual shorter than usual honestly we usually don't have this much overlap towards the end yeah yeah you know like usually uh it gets longer but anyway let's uh let's take one quick break and we'll come back and we'll wrap up sure

AJ is sitting down and we're back to wrap up this wonderful 2024 goatee episode, which, which was, uh, always, always wonderful. Another one for the books. It's our seventh. I can't believe it. Seventh one. Seventh one. This year went, I mean. A lot happened, but it went especially quickly. Reflecting on what came out in January, I was like, what?

oh I was playing all the GameCube games that's where the summer went yeah man what a wild thing you and I both started new podcasts me and you yeah this year yeah congrats once again yeah uh you started a new youtube channel youtube channels yeah yeah it's amazing uh a lot of a lot of stuff going on a lot of new things i feel uh we're also recording this on the solstice in a different place than normal ushering in new and exciting change yeah

Steven didn't notice, but I did bring the Dragon Quest line from home. Oh, yes! Yeah, you were in front of it. I didn't see until now. I was actually thinking about him. Yeah, there's a metal... slime that steven gave me that has become a fixture of our goatee recording process kind of our mascot he's kind of our mascot um sorry that your video game didn't make the top yeah yeah he's like what the fuck yeah uh hey when 12 eventually comes out

sure that will be do you think 12 is going to have uh turn-based combat i would guess it seems at the direction a lot of long running rpgs like Trails and Final Fantasy are going is I would guess it would have it will have like like light action combat in the overworld when you're like hitting an enemy before battle and then it will transport you into the turn-based battle. The choice of either. Yeah. I don't see them dropping it.

yeah that makes sense that's kind of it's also what metaphor kind of does where you can like there's more depending on what archetype you have equipped you can do different attacks in in the sort of map and then it will transport you to the battles I feel very strongly, and this is a little bit morbid, so sorry in advance to end our wonderful high note with stuff like this, but...

But with Toriyama passing and Tsukiyama passing as well, and Yuji Hori being like the last of the trifecta of people who put Dragon Quest together, I think even if there was a plan to have it have action combat at some point, I could see this being like...

And I think he would probably want it to be as close to the metal in terms of like what the three of them as friends put together. Yeah. I mean, it's because we don't really know much about it at all because the last time we heard about it, they were saying it was going to be like darker and kind of like if Eleven was.

like a swan song of of dragon quest up until now 12 was going to be like a more mature yeah entry but who knows what that even means the weed dungeon yeah exactly the weed dungeon yeah weed gym um yeah i don't think that's coming next year though i think that's gonna be no no i think we'll probably get the chrono trigger remake before we get

dragon quest 12 yeah i actually do think that that will happen maybe even next year we've talked we've talked about how we don't know what square enix is doing next year other than uh i guess dragon quest one and two yeah i could see chrono trigger being a weirdly big tentpole release for them. I also think... the Oblivion remake will really happen.

i'm so torn about that yeah i think it's gonna be it's gonna be strange yeah i think here's can i i'll call this shot for a mile away i think i think i'm gonna love it and you're gonna be weirdly turned off by it that's not uncommon yeah we'll see i mean i would love for it to be good it'll be my number one game of the year i'll be like it changed my life I'll start crying. It's interesting to think about like what games call for remake.

and it's like in some ways that does call for one but it's why I don't want it yeah I agree with you yes to be clear yeah but you know i'd love to see what they do um i think it will take a lot for that game to come out and for me to say you should play this one instead of the original i think there's like no world in which that happens sure i guess i just don't

Yeah, I mean we don't have to talk about too much. Yeah, it is so funny that this conversation is happening at the end of our seven hour go to yeah yeah this is like a little this is just a regular episode yeah yeah yeah i guess what should we talk about instead what well i'm curious like if there are any upcoming because we usually do this like you know we talk about

known upcoming releases for 2025 and if there are any we're excited about or just what we're excited about for the new year ahead of us Yeah. Right off the bat, as I pull up my Steam wish list, Citizen Sleeper 2. Oh, yeah. I am really looking forward to it.

oh yeah grand theft auto 6 is coming out next year that's gonna be a big deal even if regardless of how we feel about it as a trio that's gonna be like the biggest thing that happens next year i'll play it i'll also play it yeah we i know we're not beholden to release schedules but we can't not play that game um wander stop the the new name from the stanley powerbill developer that's exciting i checked our backlog but i didn't see any 2025 releases has a release date which i didn't realize

March 11th. March 11th. We weren't supposed to know that. I'm sorry. It's on Steam. We weren't supposed to know that. avowed is coming out next year also steven oh really yeah that's the obsidian elder scrolls yeah yeah that's uh that's getting really good preview coverage which is exciting uh starvators is a game people really love the demo of. Oh, that was great. Yeah, I was into that. Here's a big one. Death Stranding 2. Death Stranding 2, of course.

the thing that might get me to buy a PlayStation 5. Hopefully the Pro comes out first and then I can buy one secondhand off of a normal PS5 secondhand off of Facebook. The PS5 Pro? No, the regular one. No, but the PS5 Pro is out. It is out. Yeah. Isn't that amazing? Okay, then maybe I should start looking for a normal PS5 on Facebook Marketplace. Give it a look. Jesus. Game I played the demo of earlier this year, Silly Poly Beast.

was kind of a Hades-like situation with a very fun little story. My Familiar, which is Q4 2025, which I think might just be a placeholder for maybe the end of the year. But it was a game we saw at PAX. It was like purple and there was like a duck And like a bat I played the demo of it, I think, on our YouTube channel or on our Twitch channel. If not, it was on .zips.

twitch channel but uh the music is unreal it's like a very fun like turn-based uh combat game the art is very good uh that's my familiar i'm looking forward to that one for sure i'm trying to remember if anything off the top of my head i'm looking forward to yeah i think there's a

i know i say this every year i think there's a good chance silk song comes out next year that's that that is the pagliacci of our show is you say that every year and it just doesn't happen yeah i mean i you know whenever it comes out yeah i'll be there but i'm excited about it i think uh well maybe i don't know actually i don't know how i feel about it at this point but i think i am looking forward to it oh uh my last one is um unbeatable

which is a new game published by play stack it's yes like a rhythm it's the rhythm game game it looks so good that does look really good punk punk girl kind of a rhythm game hi-fi rush vibes with that yep you like yep yep um i think i mean like truly the biggest thing happening next year outside of grand theft auto 6 though is the switch 2 like there's gonna be a new switch

next year yeah are you sure yeah nintendo hasn't said that well they sure haven't uh actually no they have they said it will release before march of 2025 wow is what they've said officially so there's gonna be a new switch next year which means it's also gonna launch

most of which we don't know one two three switch two it's possible um likely Mario Kart 9 seems to be the frontrunner most of the leaks and rumors indicate that Mario Kart 9 will be a launch title which is a smart decision that'd be really exciting because I mean Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

as it was was like an immortal timeless game yeah and then they added all those cool levels to it yeah which they just what is working now they just finished adding those what a few months ago right yeah like that was when the last pack came out so that that feels real that's exciting that feels um yeah it's been a long time since we got an actual just

interesting like an odyssey you mean yeah yeah it's been i guess we got wonder but there hasn't been like a 3d one exactly um and pokemon za is also slated for next year which uh i'm looking forward to at least i'm a

Legends Arceus diehard. Oh, Slay the Spire 2 is entering early access next year. That's exciting. Speaking of early access, Hades 2 will probably leave early access next year. That's kind of why I put... hades 2 i mean many reasons in honorable mentions because i'm like it probably feels like it will come out this coming year yeah that'll be next year's sweep yeah yeah maybe even fields of maestria as well yeah i would guess because that feels pretty ready yeah um

i want that on switch really bad i hope i hope that that launches on switch oh you know what else comes out next year uh the new fantasy life the girl who steals time you're right i forgot they got pushed the next year yeah according to backlog at least and then uh Oh, baby. Civ 7. I don't know what it is about the odd numbered civs, but those hit for me. You have one. You can't choose. That's going to be so good.

and yeah hark the ghoul is another uh demo i played oh another this looks like it's 2026 but abyss x zero yes dude oh my god i am so i'm so looking forward to that game i can't wait that's that's the same people who made unsighted it's their next game but it's like an N64 looking ass

like I don't even know what the gameplay is so that came to be totally honest yeah i i wish it looks fucking rad sometimes you just wish list based off vibes yeah i'm like oh yeah it looks so fucking good be a heart the ghoul comes out uh next year so does star videos like you said um yeah it's this is the other thing we say every year but it's like it's cool knowing that like any year we do this show there's something that comes out of nowhere that like steals all our hearts and minds

yeah like ball travel like i wouldn't have ever guessed that would be like my one of my favorite games of the year and our game of the year yeah 2024 um shout out matt again yeah shout out matt who did know matt knew the whole time who did know yes yeah I think honestly like looking at 2025 I think the thing that I'm really the most jazzed about in advance is the Switch 2. I think that that's going to be...

so like even if it's not good it's gonna be fascinating you know like yeah it's gonna be big the amount of conversations we'll have about the switch to will be endless and so fun you know it'll be un like so normal or so what the fuck i totally ruined that i mean so boring mundane it's like the exact same as the switch but maybe a little better that's kind of how the because like we

again like i like the ps5 like the new xbox but that's how those have felt where it's like yeah this kind of feels like a hardware upgrade over a new console right there's a good chance that for better or for worse the new switch will feel more like a new console yeah yeah So that's exciting. Have they confirmed that it's called the Switch 2? No, but there have been many, many, many leaks over the past week that are like all but confirmed that it is the Switch 2. But it's not just a Switch Pro.

if it's the nintendo yippee we are owed money i agree yeah yeah um yep we and now you can now you can waggle it yeah we don't have to get into with this switch two leaks are like but um there are a lot of them and uh it's gonna be called the switch too and it looks exactly like the normal switch it's just bigger you said uh about before kingdom hearts 3 came out you're like i'll believe that game is coming out when i'm

rolling credits. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which I never actually did. So it never really came out. And it's weird they're making a fourth one considering the third one's out. Go to 2025, King of Hearts 3. I feel that way about Switch 2 where it's like I'm kind of... trying to set my expectations like i'm once i'm like setting up my login yeah that's when it will hit me yeah yeah um i will say the onboarding process of the ps5 is pretty fun like i like the they make it pleasant

I don't remember it at all. What happens in the onboarding process? Someone comes to your house and says, do you want to be your own boss? We would like to play. You give them your credit card and social security number and it's like, PS5 would like to play. oh man this is fun yeah I don't know I'm just I think I think next year's gonna be really interesting can I say it I'll say it I'm pumped for the PSP

I can't wait. Is that actually the thing both of us are looking forward to the most? Probably. I'll be honest. When we wrapped the recording of GameCube, I was like... I don't know if I can do this again. I had a great time recording it and I liked that episode a lot. You and I fucked our lives up by doing that and Games of the Decade at the same time. Yeah, and we just didn't give ourselves... Normally when we do... I think all those episodes came out great.

and I'm really proud of them yeah but like doing all that back to back to back was too much I just think we were burnt out yeah yeah I don't want to I don't want to detract from your experience dear listener if you enjoy those episodes because we also i mean like at the core of it i did enjoy making them i'm glad that we did it like it was it was we basically did what should have been three seasons yeah in like six months

Yeah, exactly. Which was like way too much work. And I mean, like truly also behind this, I haven't talked about this that much, but like my work life has gotten so intense. like pretty much around the exact same time we were doing that like

It just picked up at a level that I wasn't anticipating and so much happened with my role at work that just put so much responsibility on my plate. So all of that happening simultaneously with like... games of the decade gamecube my work life i was like getting engaged at the same time as well like what was happening just so much happened at once by the time all that stuff was done it was like dog i don't i don't know how to speak into a microphone anymore yeah and i mean i think

we one of the challenges of doing this show is like we always want to take on like we've said many times like whenever we wrap a season we're like what else can we do yeah what more can we take on how can we grow and i think it's it's really easy to conflate that with

you know just like eventually burning yourselves out yeah like there's a difference between like growing and adapting and maybe like uh just doing too much simply yeah and i want to say i want to give a huge shout out to our listeners and anyone who you know

has supported the show by listening or our patrons like the fact that we can kind of speak directly to all of you and let us know let you know that like when the show is feeling like too much when we have to kind of change our plans yeah or adapt to our you know lives because we love making this show and we obviously it's always like fun work but we also never want the show to suffer because we're like forcing it to be you know a certain amount of output so I just

i'm really really grateful that like we've never had someone be like where's my episode we need a break or whenever we've communicated like we need to take like a summer vacation or we we won't be releasing episodes these weeks yeah you've all understood and it makes

making this show feel wonderful yeah it just feels like we're all on the same page yeah totally yeah i maybe actually that's maybe a good time to sneak in at the end yeah we have a giveaway we have a giveaway uh we have a giveaway we we ps5 have a giveaway um So shout out to a friend of the show, Constant Companion. I don't know. Santa's little helper. I don't know what to say. Great guy. All around great guy, Kyle Starr, who just absolutely rules.

built us custom Game Boy Advances when we did our Game Boy Advance episode and this year has come through with an amazing gif uh which is 10 free months of the top tier of our patreon which is like such a cool thing to do yeah to give away to 10 of you dear listeners and we need to figure out what the what the code word is and how how they can send it in um but for 10 of you we'll just choose at random 10 of you if you're already subscribed to the patreon

you're not at the top tier, I do think this is still eligible for you. I think you can still redeem this. So even if you're already back in the Patreon, this will work. But what should they do? My first thought is you can add us on Blue Sky or Threads or in the Discord or DM us anywhere. Let's just let's. Let's stick to one to keep it easier. Blue Sky. Yeah, let's do Blue Sky. Let's do Blue Sky.

If you add us on Blue Sky and say it's kind of like a re-Fantasio and just put a picture of your favorite thing. uh i love oh yeah favorite thing favorite thing like it could be favorite food you know favorite like vacation spot whatever yeah your favorite thing and say it's kind of like a re-phantasia which you know what that means it basically means like the king of fantasy yeah but

It's kind of going to be Fantasio and your favorite thing. Yeah. If you don't follow those instructions, you will not be eligible. Very frequently, people will enter... Try to get clever. People will try to be clever. Yeah. And they will... accidentally disqualify themselves from these. So, dude, I'm sure you're clever, dear listener, but don't disqualify yourself by not following those rules exactly. Share us your favorite thing and say it's kind of like a re-Fantasio. Yes.

And if you don't want to enter the giveaway, but you have made it to the end of the episode. I love this. Yes. You can add us on Blue Sky. The phrase we would, sorry, PS5 would like to play with any picture you can find or take of a Wiimote. Love it. That's so confusing. I was going to say yippee. Yeah. I feel like that's another fun one. I love that. So repeat that again. Can I try? Yeah, please. I'm going to complicate it even more. Okay, wait. So let's go back.

if you want to enter the giveaway and get one month this is the important thing yes get one month of the top tier of our patreon for free thanks to kyle star which will give you access to our entire every episode of our second show any percent

our big dnd episode everything we've made you'll have access to including an ad free feed ad free feed yes you'll get all that for one month if you on blue sky at reply the show the podcast specifically into the cast on blue sky not us individually but into the cast It's kind of like a re-Fantasio and include a picture of your favorite thing. Okay. Now, for AJ's thing, if you don't want to enter that giveaway, what you can do is go to threads.

okay all right yeah i was gonna say this but i wasn't sure how much we're gonna do threads i love this no i think this is great at into the cast ps5 would like to play image of a wiimote and and i'm not i'm not going to tell steven or aj what this is in advance until it happens But I will pick one person who does that and give them a separate gift. They will win a separate contest. Eligible anywhere in the world.

I will make it happen. I don't care where you live. Oh my God. I have an idea and I need to see it through. i love this ps5 would like to play you know what i can't wait i can't wait to get a notification on threads in like two years yeah because we still like i i regret I deeply yippee. us saying one year to send us a picture of ikea furniture it like jenny when they got to me every once in a while yeah and sometimes i still get a billy bookcase on my dog i get a mona lisa every now and then

I like when people tag me in the Discord every once in a while and just says, thank you. It means they listen to one of the, I think, at the beginning of the decade or something. Yes. It's very good. Dude the Dew was a really good one. Oh, yeah, that was a good one. With a picture of Master Chief. Yeah. But yeah, it's kind of like, once again. It's kind of like a ReFantasio with a picture of your favorite thing on blue sky to enter the Patreon giveaway. Yeah. Yes. And then for the, for the.

Feywild contest you don't want to enter that B1 and tell us you finished the episode PS5 would like to play with a picture of a Wiimote on threads at the show and Brendan may or may Well, no, you will. I will. I'll send you something. send you something it will send you an unknown prize i like brendan may or may not say i will pick a winner and maybe they'll get something no one will know yeah um xoxo very important you only at reply the show not

Yes. Just the show. Yes. And the words. Yes. Save my menchies. Yes. so that's it yeah that is it that is it 2024 would love to give one more huge shout out to brendan and lana for allowing us to record in their space this was so nice yeah oh and one more thing for the patreon uh as sort of a to this episode. That's funny. We spent like 20 minutes on the secret second giveaway in January. Unsubscribe. Unsubscribe. PS5 would like to podcast. PS5 would like to podcast.

it's a third giveaway uh patreon uh in january we are doing a second game of the episode for 2017 so brendan and i will be sharing our 10 favorite games each from 2017 may start an annual tradition of doing like a random year from the past.

as sort of like a second bonus goatee episode um so i'm looking forward to that because that was an especially great year for video games and it was the year before we started the show uh so that'll be cool to do yeah so that will be on the patreon for uh five dollar tier yeah or lower or higher or higher My brain is rewired after PS5 would like to play. Yeah, it makes perfect sense to me. Should I go to the hospital? That 2017 patron.

that 2017 patreon go to episode will be coming out sometime in january yeah we haven't set a recording date yet but that will be in january i think it'll be really fun to release that in the year the switch 2 comes out that'll be fun to have a look back at the like the launch year of the switch yeah totally um

Wow. And that actually wraps it up. That actually wraps it up. Unless you want to use a little daydream about the PSP a little more. Yeah. What game are you most looking forward to playing on the PSP? I mean, probably Joan d'Arc, right? Yeah. Joan d'Arc seems pretty good. Anybody who's anybody's looking at Joan. Yeah. Are you thinking about any PSP games? Peace Walker.

always peace walker oh hell yeah i played peace walker on ps2 um yeah in the little bundle that was on ps or ps3 whatever it was yeah and i really want to play it on close to original hardware yeah uh for me it's a game i'm already playing and haven't brought to the show yet because i haven't played enough of it but it's called brave story new traveler which is another like Just weird RPG. I feel like the PSP has a lot of the best versions of games I like.

like ff4 fantasy 4 like apparently the best version is really the complete story for a reason yeah and then um yeah it's got it's got a epilogue yeah wow maybe i'll finally finish final fantasy 4 that'd be fun to talk about together and then the best version of Final Fantasy Tactics is also on the PSP yeah yeah so I'm looking but I also don't know a lot of PSP games so that's like the Daxter games

Yeah, there's Daxter, and then there is a Jak and Daxter game. You know, I don't know Jak. I haven't played a single Jak and Daxter game. Really? Wow. I just missed them. I missed that era. Like, I played Crash, but I didn't play Ratchet and Clank or Jak. I was fully in Agent Clank are those on PSP? PS5 would like to play I think we gotta sign off my name is Brendan Bigley Brendan gives me when I'm like we gotta go we gotta run you can find me on the internet at Brendan Bigley on most

platforms and the ps5 and the ps5 you can actually that's not true uh and you can go to wavelengths online if you want to read my blog uh check out uh my other podcasts i do npc next portable console uh over with max stories or watch my YouTube stuff, of which there will be, I'll say this,

without alluding to too much a lot more of in 2025 look forward to that exciting yes uh hey uh i'm steven hilger you can find me at steven hilger and at steven hilger art in most places i'm most active on blue sky these days and Instagram relatively. I like sharing my art there. I'm hoping to share more art in general next year as well. It's a resolution of mine. I also have a YouTube channel called Memory Card Manuscript where I've been making

short essays about games from the past. So they're kind of like micro bonus episodes in some ways. I just did one on Yoshi's Island, which was a lot of fun to make. And I'm making a video about my top five goatee and go toy picks here.

So that'll be fun. If you, if you want like kind of a more authored version of what I said here, I'll be sharing that in the near future, hopefully. And actually I'll say, since we're at the end of this, the next one for that's going to be Chrono Cross. I don't know when, but that's my next. That's my next memory card video. Assemble the skeleton clown.

that one will be the skeleton cloud yes i'll probably draw him for the thumbnail that will be uh in in probably february uh if i had to guess best soundtrack of all time aj and i'm aj faleri i am at aj faleri on everything that's aj f as in frank I-L-L-A-R-I. That's how I give my last name over the phone. I like that. I'm Sven Giggly. You can find me at Bigly.

I'm on mostly blue sky, but I'm also, I'm, I'm mostly hanging out in the discord, but I also have a, wow, we made it to the end of this 10 hour fireplace on and it ended. It just ended and started a new one. I also have another podcast called .zip that I host with my friends Chase and Kim, and they also have other podcasts. This one looks like you're a pizza being cooked. I'm being cooked. Yeah.

Pizza AJ. I'm getting cooked on main. We play short games, usually by single developers or small teams. The tagline is big games in small packages. If you want to check out most of the games that I talked about today, to be honest.

Larger conversations about those, including a five-hour conversation about my game of the year, thousand times resist. That's all there on .zip. I think that's... join the discord join the discord if you want to hire me i'll edit your podcast i'll do it oh yeah this is a threat that's a fucking threat if you want to hire aj leaving tag them on myspace yeah On Flickr. Make AJ a Twitter account and tweet at Elon Musk. What's your data? No. Thanks for listening, everyone. Happy New Year. Take care.

I can't believe we didn't come. Oh yeah.